


Thank You For Hiring Pan-Pacifica Construction!

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2014-11-24
Packaged: 2017-12-27 20:17:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 33,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/983160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alternate Universe; Raleigh and Yancy Becket are war-scarred veterans who run a construction and landscaping company. Their coworkers are a pair of big Russians, three Chinese triplets who can't stop bickering, and a Chinese-Peruvian hipster with an indestructible pompadour.<br/>A married couple named Stacker and Hercules (yes, really) hire them to build a wall to save their yard from an unseen animal menace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Thank You For Hiring Pan-Pacifica Construction!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: at a friendly suggestion from a reader, I decided to re-edit these and improve the spacing. I hope this is easier to read!

"You sure this is the place?" Raleigh asked.  
And for the umpteenth time, Tendo sighed and said, "Yeah, this is the place. Yeah, Becket, I'm sure! Now come the fuck on, calm down. It's just a house, just like any other house." Tendo was silent for a long while, toying with the cigarette between his lips, before he shifted in the driver's seat and added, "Bigass yard aside."

They drove for a good minute in silence, tawny dirt fanning back up off the road around them.  
Raleigh didn't know what to make of California. He was used to the cold, used to places suffused with green and pallid sunlight and then brilliant, blue-white winters. He missed snow.

He wasn't sure if he was supposed to think the rambling meadow chock full of white sage and wild mustard and other plants he couldn't identify was impressive, or just unkempt. He'd never had his own yard, and had nothing to go by.

"There's the house," Tendo nodded, ahead, and then all Raleigh could do was stare in shocked awe.  
The house on top of one of the hills was two stories tall, built long and tall like a Spanish villa, with orange tiles like fingernails on a barely-slanted roof overshadowing white plaster walls, eight dark windows with intricate metal work grates around them. 

"Holy shit," he said, as they crested a final rise, and he could see that the entire front yard was a courtyard surrounded by a low white plaster wall. A screen of trees hid the house's front from view of the street.

There was a slight bump as the truck's tires crossed over onto the brick paving stones that made up the courtyard; Tendo swung the truck around the horseshoe-shaped driveway and parked in the shade of a huge pine tree, its knobbled limbs shedding needles onto the sun-baked orange bricks underfoot.

"Shit, Tendo, this is--this isn't some little suburban yard do-over--these people have _money_ , if we fuck up--"

"If we fuck up, it's all gonna end up on my head. Guy who owns the place used to be my boss," Tendo said, and looked at him significantly. "And we're _not_ gonna fuck up. It's gonna be cake, and we're gonna walk away with fat, sexy wallets. Ya dig?"  
Raleigh got the message; Raleigh shut the hell up.

Tendo killed the truck's engine and they both climbed out, sunlight hitting them like flat hot palms coming straight down from the sky.

They walked up to the front door--under a white plaster arch where cream-colored roses that looked like cabbages grew on wrought-iron lattices bolted to the plaster. Even the rust-trails coming from the nails looked picturesque and perfect. The house was like something out of a magazine.

"Chill, man. These guys are cool, you'll see. None of that hidden-camera bullshit. Like I told you, my ex-boss Stacker's a really good guy, this'll be a good gig. You'll have your rustbucket up and running again in no time," Tendo said, and elbowed him in the side.

Raleigh laughed a little and elbowed him back, but the weird worry kept nagging at him.  
"My girl Danger is _not_ a rustbucket," he said.

"Hey, don't get huffy. I can't keep a relationship; you can't pick out a car. We've all got flaws."  
While he was laughing, Tendo knocked on the door--the house being so old (or so obscenely fancy) that there wasn't a doorbell button to push.

He half-expected to be met at the door by some rich bastard with a fancy sweater thrown over his shoulders. So he was surprised to be met instead by a tall, somewhat rawboned redheaded man in a gray chambray shirt, rolled up off his freckled forearms.

He didn't look like a rich bastard; actually, he looked good-natured and very freckled and slightly sunburnt, like the kinds of guys Raleigh was used to having to do yard-jobs with.

"Tendo!" he said. His voice had an interesting twang--New Zealand, Raleigh thought, or Australia.  
"Hey, Herc!" Tendo said, and they were hugging and slapping each other's backs.

"What dustbowl did _you_ crawl out of, mate? You look like you ran behind the truck and took half the road with you!"

"Ahh, the old gray mare ain't what she used to be. AC's busted, so we drove up with the windows down," Tendo explained.  
He half-turned to Raleigh. 

"This here's a good friend of mine, Raleigh Becket."  
"Pleasure," Herc said, and his palm was slightly callused and gentle and perfectly firm, when they shook hands.

"Yeah," Raleigh said, "Nice to meet you, too."  
The corners of Herc's eyes crinkled up into crow's-feet when he smiled, and Raleigh started to feel half-guilty for noticing. He was starting to remind himself of Tendo--wanting who he couldn't have.  
Tendo continued, "The company's just him, me, his brother, and a couple of our friends. You'll like 'em; we'll have your yard done in no time."

"Sounds good, sounds good. Hey--come in, let's get something to drink before we have to talk shop. Stacker's not home yet, so we've got time to kill."  
Raleigh was staring around at the huge, brick-paved front courtyard and clenching his jaw to keep it from falling open.

Tendo elbowed him in the side, and they stepped into the house, and he instantly felt ten thousand times stupider _and_ poorer. Simultaneously.

The floors underfoot were amber-orange tiles with a Moorish design, the walls a butter-white. There were potted trees in all the corners, and the only furniture apparent was a huge dark-wood armoire, its doors open wide, with a handful of coats hanging up in it, and a somewhat haphazard pile of shoes kicked beneath it. The drawers beneath the hanging compartment were slightly ajar, and papers--envelopes, old receipts, cards--stuck out slightly.

The little bit of humanness calmed Raleigh down. Not much.  
This was before he realized they were only standing in the foyer.

To either side, long corridors opened with big windows into the outside, morning sunlight turning the window-glass blue and gold. Black wrough-iron chandeliers hung from the ceiling everywhere.

Directly to their front, Raleigh could see farther back into the house--huge open living room to the right, with tawny-colored Navajo rugs on the floor, underneath the impressive carved feet of dark wooden couches and chairs, all done in black suede. Past the couches there was a huge fireplace with an open hearth, a big brick arch set far back into the wall with a concrete tongue of the hearth extended out into the living room. The fireplace's inside, and part of the extension, were scorched black with use. He could see chopped wood arranged in a neat pyramid, just beside the fireplace, in a decorative punched-iron caddy. Pillows and a blanket were tossed onto one of the couches, nearest the concrete extension.

To the left side of the middle corridor there was an equally-impressive kitchen, cedar cabinets and white tiles with designs of blue and yellow flowers on the wall behind the stove. 

Beyond all of that, the house's whole back wall was a huge bank of windows, long and low, opening onto an almost panoramic view of the mountains behind the house. In the light, the blue sky against the black-speckled brown mountains made the entire view look more like a photograph or poster than anything real.

"You won't _believe_ the trouble we've been having with the damned neighbors. The second we moved in, it's all Confederate flags and loud parties. And we're so far out, the police take forever to show up. But...Stacker loves this house," Herc was saying. "Tried to convince him to move to Australia, but, well," Herc shrugged. "That's where the summer home is, anyway."  
He took them into the kitchen and offered them drinks.

Tendo was trying to have a Good Day (which meant, Raleigh knew, that he was going to go out tomcatting later that night, and wanted to spare his liver) and settled on water. Raleigh accepted a beer more out of courtesy than thirst, and stood holding the sweating bottle while Herc talked.

"S'a beauty, but the upkeep on the yard's murderous," Herc said.  
Raleigh snapped his eyes away from the view in time to see Tendo nod.  
"I bet. Damn, I hope you guys aren't thinking of putting down a lawn!" 

"Oh, god no! Stacker wants a garden. But I wasn't just talking about the water bill when I said the upkeep was murderous. It's the wildlife," Herc muttered. He took a pull on his own beer, and cast an evil look at the back yard.

"At least, we _think_ it is. Mako swears it's the neighbors' dogs. Either way, every plant smaller than a tree that we've planted out into the yard ends up chewed to all hell a day later. We've tried all the tricks--scarecrows, plastic owls, those damn strobe light things with motion sensors. Nothing works. The little bastards are just so damn _brazen_!"  
"Huh," Tendo said.

"So we figured we might as well wall in the part of the yard nearest the house. Thought I'd ask you for an estimate, first--how much you'd need to give us a perimeter around, say half the yard. I can take you out and show you how much space."

 

~

 

The backyard was huge. There was another paved area immediately behind the back of the house--herringbone brick, very obviously old, Raleigh could tell, and in need of more or better mortar. The rest of the yard seemed to stretch on forever, clay soil and a handful of scrubby bushes, low brambly grass and weeds waving in the breeze. Brown-black mountains rose in the far distance behind the house. In the near distance, the sloping hillsides were covered with brilliant orange and yellow flowers, nodding slightly in the hot breeze. There was a fringe of pine trees, standing in a slightly-uneven line along the yard's western margin, their blue-black needled limbs rustling slightly in the breeze. A soft sighing noise came between their branches.

He could see, to the west, and downhill, another house--big and slovenly, with an empty pool in the back yard cracked almost beyond repair. There was also a ramshackle wooden shed with a wrecked dune buggy standing in its shade. The dune buggy was up on cinderblocks with weeds growing through its rusted-out chassis. There was no grass--or any plant that wasn't a weed--anywhere in the yard. 

"Damn, have they never heard of yard maintenance?" Tendo muttered, somewhere behind him and to his left.  
Raleigh heard Herc snort. "It was worse when we first moved in. You wouldn't believe the number of junked cars they had back there, just collecting dust and spiderwebs. Motorcycles, too."

When he turned, Herc was shaking his head. He, Herc, and Tendo walk a few yards off, Herc gesturing at the hard-baked clay ground every now and again. They talked about potential sprinkler systems--and decided against most of them. 

"You could always put down a rock garden," Raleigh suggested. "Or a xerophytic landscape. Succulents and stuff, you know, cactuses. It'd fill the space, and a lot of 'em are actually really nice looking when they're in bloom."

"Not a bad idea," Herc mused. He turned to look back at the run-down yard next door, and muttered, "Maybe we ought to plant nothing _but_ cactuses. It'd sure as shit keep the little bastards out. Probably work just as well as a wall, or at least give 'em something to think about after they take a bite."  
All three men laughed.

They came back up towards the house, their feet crunching over the gravel.

"Ah," Tendo said, finally, "Looks like it won't be too bad. Me n' Raleigh will run this job by Yancy, see what he says. Should be a done-deal."

Raleigh heard the door open behind him, and turned to see a young Asian woman standing in the doorway. She was wearing a tank top the same shade of electric blue as the tips in her bobbed black hair, and black jeans tucked into a pair of black boots. She looked at Raleigh with guarded curiosity.  
"Mako! You're back, then?" 

Raleigh half-turned at the sound of Herc's voice, but couldn't look away from her.  
She looked past him and at Herc, her face lifting into a smile. "We picked Max up from the vet, too. He's all right, but he has a cone..."

Herc sighed and shook his head, his eyes going to the ground.  
Raleigh looked at Tendo and moved closer to him, fighting the urge to elbow him and ask who the hot girl was. Tendo took one look between the two of them before a wicked smile crossed his face.

"Mako? Bird-legged Mako? That's not you," Tendo said, grinning, as he stepped up closer to the door.  
"Hello, Tendo. Are you still flirting with anything walking?" she countered, one eyebrow raised.  
He shrugged; Raleigh laughed. 

"Raleigh, Mako. Mako, Raleigh." Tendo nodded at Mako, and then sort of shrugged at Raleigh.  
They shook hands, Mako's thoughtful face unfurling into a tentative smile.  
"Herc! HERC! DAD!" 

And the quiet was abruptly crushed when another man came storming in. He had sandy-brown hair and a scowl already plastered over his face, and he came up short when he saw Raleigh standing on the patio.  
"The hell're you?" 

The Australian accent Raleigh liked so much from Herc sounded a lot more annoying, coming out of the mouth of someone who was determined to be unpleasant, Raleigh realized.  
"Uh. We're the--"

"Tendo!" the man was saying, next, his face breaking into a grin. The change was like night and day.  
"Chuck, this here's my good friend Raleigh Becket. Me, him, n' his brother Yancy go way back. His brother Yancy's the one who owns the construction company I was telling you about. Pan-Pacifica Construction. You remember, yeah?" Tendo looked at Raleigh and raised an eyebrow.  
Raleigh looked at Chuck and tried to smile. Chuck didn't look back at him.

"Ohhh," Chuck said instead, his grin going crooked as he looked from Raleigh to Tendo.  
"So, the old man did something right. I told him not to go with any of those big companies--they charge out the ass n' take forever." 

It was like the scowl had never happened. He was actually _cute_.  
Raleigh bit the inside of his bottom lip.

"Did Herc tell you about the trees yet?" Chuck continued, still refusing to make eye contact with Raleigh.

"I didn't," Herc said, levelly, but before he could say anything else, a man's voice from inside called them all in.

 

Stacker Pentecost was, and was not, exactly who Raleigh was expecting.  
If he'd been the one to answer the door, Raleigh would have felt that his first guess--that the house was owned by a pair of rich bastards--was completely correct.

Not to say that Stacker was a bastard; it was just that the man's every gesture spoke of culture and class; that every single garment he was wearing probably cost more than Raleigh's entire wardrobe; and that he seemed to exude confidence and control--and kindness.

"So, the trees are ours," he was saying, "And I'd like to have the wall contain them. The neighbors like to use them for target practice," he said, the words twisting on his tongue as if they tasted bad.  
Tendo nodded. "That won't be a problem. They're a little farther back, though, so..."

"It'd only be a matter of more bricks and, probably, another day or so of work," Raleigh said. "It doesn't look like the grade is too steep or anything. Most likely, we won't need any equipment any heavier than a couple of wheelbarrows."

Stacker looked at him, and he blinked and wanted to flinch. Being at the receiving end of that kind of intense focus was a strange feeling. But then the older man smiled, evidently pleased, and nodded.  
"That's good to hear."

They were sitting in the living room, now, Raleigh trying his hardest to relax the tiniest bit and not think about how much it would cost to re-upholster a couch like theirs, if his jeans' rivets accidentally tore the leather.

Chuck was in the kitchen, chopping potted meat into a bowl, humming. Every so often, he would duck his head and laugh--a small, secretive sound. Raleigh watched him put the bowl into the microwave before the younger man ducked out of sight below the counter--when he heard scritching sounds and a dog's contented, thick panting.

"Y'like that? Huh, Maxie? Y'like that? Who was such a good boy at the vet's? Was it _you_?"  
Chuck said.

Raleigh couldn't see what kind of dog he had, but he was wagering it was something purebred and perfect.  
His attention was pulled back to their conversation as everyone around him began standing up. Tendo and Stacker shook hands, Herc collected their empty bottles, and Mako was grinning at Tendo like she Knew Something.

"And, Tendo," Stacker said, as they were on their way to the front door, "Don't be such a stranger. Now I know for a fact you haven't got an excuse to stay away."  
Beside him, Herc smiled and chimed in, "You kids drive safe."


	2. The Family Business

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone is starting to show up!  
> Here they are (not necessarily in order):  
> The Weis, breaking yard tools; the Kaidonovskies, getting dirty and then getting clean; and the elder Becket, attempting to make coffee.  
> As always, I hope you enjoy reading. Comments are beloved, even if I am too shy to reply to them~!

"They seem nice," Raleigh said, for lack of other things to say, once they were back in Tendo's truck. "Mako's really cute. I'm surprised she didn't attack you on sight for whatever grief I'm sure you caused her." 

"Who, her? No way, man. She's like my kid sister. Stacker and Herc...Stacker and Herc helped me out a lot, after my granddad died. Like I told you, they're good people." Tendo said.  
Raleigh only nodded. He wasn't entirely sure, but his head was still reeling from everything that had gone on earlier during the day.

Aside from the Pentecost-Hansen family being alarmingly nice, they seemed alarmingly perfect. Usually the people who called them in to do work were wealthy-ish, and assholes. It'd been a long time since he'd been to any job where the people weren't frazzled and trying to get in last-minute renovations before shoving the house back onto the market.

Part of him always bristled in annoyance, at that; it was as if no one wanted a _home_ anymore, just a really big asset that could be sold or bartered off if the owners got tired of it.

It made him feel like his work--like _their_ work--was cheap, and not really appreciated. Like all their sweat amounted to nothing but window-dressing for a sale.

He thought about Herc and Stacker sitting together on the couch, half-mirroring one another's movements; about Chuck in the kitchen making kissy-faces at the dog; at the way Mako had kept looking over he and Tendo's heads, at the trees in the back yard.

The Pentecost-Hansens didn't have a house; they'd built themselves a _home_. 

He was half-envious and half-relieved to be broken out of his thoughts when they pulled up in front of their base of operations--a connected house and garage, with another (much less-battered) white truck already in the driveway. On the truck's door there was a navy-blue robot wearing a yellow hard-hat, giving a thumbs-up. Lighter-blue letters ringed the image, reading 'Pan-Pacifica Construction and Landscaping Company' up top, and their phone number beneath.

"You wanna go in and tell Yancy we're here? I'll get the truck parked and all the stuff put away."  
"Yeah, sure," Raleigh said.

 

Inside the garage, three identical men were standing around a scratched, dented metal worktable, swearing at the mangled remains of a lawn mower.

"I told you it wasn't the motor," one of them said.  
"You always say it isn't the motor." another muttered. He had a red-and-yellow paisley bandanna tied around his forehead, darkened with sweat.

"Because it usually isn't!" the first snapped, and shoved him slightly.

The third only watched them, his arms crossed over his chest, biting his lips and shaking his head.  
Raleigh let the side door close behind him, and tapped the quiet man on the shoulder.  
"Uh, Cheung? What...happened to the green mower?"

"It was sputtering and smoking," he said. "Hu swore it was the motor. Jin disagreed."  
Raleigh looked back at the other two, whose conversation had devolved into bickering with the occasional Cantonese epithet thrown in. (The only reason Raleigh recognized these are because he's been out drinking with them and Tendo, and none of them were quiet when drunk.)

"Uh, you know what, I'm just gonna...trust you guys to get this sorted out. Can you make sure they don't end up breaking the, uh, already-broken parts?"

Cheung shook his head and sighed. "I'll do my best, man, but I'm not going to promise anything."  
Through the house door there was the kitchen--small and mildly cluttered, the old fridge humming under its coat of sticky-notes. The table was mostly obscured under paperwork, everything from receipts to faxes; Yancy was in charge of everything and swore up and down that he had a System In Place, one which no one was to tamper with.

Their business seemed to be doing fine, so Raleigh was inclined to agree with that.  
He was shrugging off his jacket, hating the grit he could feel against his skin, wondering if he had time to take a shower. 

He started to yell for Yancy, before deciding against it. Instead, he went through the kitchen doors on the opposite side, into the narrow room that functioned as Yancy's office.

A computer hummed on a desk, the screensaver a fishtank. The screen's glow barely lit the small room, where, on the opposite side, someone was huddled, asleep on a shapeless old gray couch.  
Raleigh sighed, smiling, shaking his head. 

"Yancy." He shook the other man a little.  
Yancy sighed and twitched in his sleep.  
"Yance. Yancy. Wake up, man."

Yancy made a noise that _might_ have been a word. The side of his face, however, remained mashed firmly into the couch's gray tartan cushions.

Raleigh leaned over his face, whispering, "Me and Tendo just landed a really primo job. You sure you wanna sleep through hearing about it?"  
At that, Yancy groaned and opened his eyes.

"Mercy. Have mercy on me, Raleigh, destroyer of sleep."  
"Come on, Tendo can tell you about the clients better than I can--he said he knows 'em. And I can't believe you're sleeping! It's two thirty, bro." 

"Yeah. Yeah. I'm up," Yancy said, swinging his legs off the couch stiffly.   
"Like fun you are. Come on, old man, you need coffee."

Yancy said something unintelligible into the collar of his shirt and, with some difficulty, stretched his arms up over his head.

"Well, you guys're back early! What happened, they take one look at Tendo's death-trap of a truck and decide we were automatically...not...trustworthy?" The last half of his words were lost in an expansive yawn.

Raleigh laughed and hung the jacket off the back of the computer chair.  
"Nah, bro. Actually...for once, the truck wasn't an issue."

Yancy snorted. "The truck's _always_ an issue. Ask Tendo; he'll tell you. That truck's held together with duct tape and good intentions."  
Yancy planted his feet, and leaned forward to get up.

Without thinking, Raleigh reached out his right hand and Yancy glanced at it, smiled a little sadly, and took it, hauling himself up off the couch. He kept his face carefully blank, and when he had his balance, he smiled--or tried to--and patted Raleigh on the arm.

He took a step towards the kitchen and Raleigh held his breath. And wanted to punch himself for it. Yancy walked stiffly, his shoulders slightly stooped, and moved to the sink. 

Raleigh could already tell by the way he was easing his weight on his right knee that it'd been a bad day for him. He didn't have to ask, and didn't want to. 

The doctors had said it was a miracle he was walking at all, after the bomb that ripped their humvee in half. You didn't spend two hours pinned under smouldering wreckage and just come skipping right back out.  
Raleigh had had to re-learn how to use his left arm. 

Yancy, they'd said, would most likely be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.  
They were wrong.

The sound of Yancy opening a cabinet shook him out of his thoughts. He drifted into the kitchen after him.

"Want coffee? Figured I might as well make a whole pot, seeing as how everyone'll be back in a little bit."  
"Yeah, sure."

And while Yancy rattled around making the coffee, Raleigh sat at the table, loosened the laces on his workboots and wished, for the umpteenth time, that California wasn't so _dusty_.

"So, how was it? This primo new job you mentioned," Yancy asked, once he was done. He sank down carefully into one of their old wooden chairs.

Raleigh watched him select exactly three pieces of paper out of the mess on the table, put them aside, and then gently scrunch the rest together into a semi-neat stack.

"It was...good. Looks like it's gonna be a long-term thing, though; they've got a huge yard, and they want it all walled in. No fence--all brick."  
Yancy whistled through his teeth.   
"Good money, but it sounds like you guys've got your work cut out for ya," he said. 

Raleigh shrugged and started to tell him about the weird yard-attacks when he was interrupted.  
There was a rattling bang from the side-door, followed by jangling keys and loud, happy talking.  
"That'll be everyone else," Yancy said.

Two seconds later a huge man with peroxide-blond hair and a brown beard was coming into the kitchen, shucking out of the top half of a work coverall. Underneath, he was wearing a faded green tank top, his arms and shoulders hugely muscled. His arms were an unsavory gray-brown from his fingertips up to his elbows, the hairs over the backs of his forearms bristling with dirt and leaf debris.

"Allo," he said, in a thick Russian accent, "Yancy and Raleigh."  
"Hey," the Becket brothers chorused. 

The Russian went to the sink and started scrubbing his arms, bent almost double to fit his hands under the tap.

"...do not like it when people have poor understanding of 'plant maintenance'. What, they think bushes prune themselves? I tell them, I am no arborist. 'Ohhh, but your company, you do construction, landscaping, _and_ garden work, it is saying here, in telephone book...', she says to me," a tall, muscular Russian woman strode into the kitchen next, pulling Tendo, Cheung, Hu, and Jin in her wake. She was also wearing a blue work coverall, and had a pair of filthy work gloves jammed into one armpit. She was gesturing expressively with both hands--her scarlet fingernails glittering in the light. Her lips were the same shade of red, twisting scornfully as she spoke. Her hair was peroxide-blonde, too, a pompadour gelled stiff and perfect and without a hair out of place. With the way she carried herself, the coverall she was wearing--buttoned to just beneath her chest, showing a V of hunter-green tank top she was wearing underneath, and a pair of scuffed, well-loved black Docs to top it off--looked like something out of a catalogue.

(One day, Raleigh told himself, he was going to ask her how she always managed to make her work clothes look like an actual, coordinated outfit and not, you know. Construction-worker clothes.)  
"Bad day?" Raleigh asked.

"Terrible! We spend entire afternoon at house of pair of idiots who do not even know what kinds of plants they have, but who are so, so certain we should be able to find out for them. We are, you know, human encyclopedias, having perfect knowledge about every species of tree and bush!" 

And Tendo was slipping past them, to where Yancy was leaned against the countertop beside the coffee machine. Raleigh heard him ask if he'd made the coffee The Right Way.  
Yancy only nodded.  
"Shit, that _does_ sound terrible," Raleigh agreed.

She was already looking away from him, at the big man at the sink. She said something in rapid Russian before hurrying over, and soon they were huddled together, talking so low he could only catch every other word.

When the coffee smell got strong enough, Jin and Hu gave up their battle against each other and the wrecked lawn-mower and came in, too, and the kitchen was suddenly like a small, vaguely-comfortable cafe where all the mugs were chipped and there were plenty of chairs but only one table.

Tendo hovered around handing out mugs of coffee; Hu and Jin suggested someone go for food--and both of them immediately devolved into another bickering match, which was refereed--but not broken up--by Tendo and Cheung. 

The Russian woman was the one who looked at Raleigh, saw he was trying to say something, and shouted everyone else down.

"Raleigh? You have face of man who is trying to speak over several loud screaming boys," she said, casting annoyed looks at the Weis.

Who all immediately dropped their eyes into their coffee cups, embarrassed.  
Raleigh smiled, thanked her, and explained the new job to everyone present, with Tendo chiming in occasionally.

"So...we don't need lawn-mowers for this job?" Hu asked, brightening.

"If we did, we would have had to turn them down," Tendo said. "That's the second time you guys have wrecked the green mower."

Everyone laughed at Hu and Jin's chagrined faces. 

Once they fell silent, Tendo added, with a completely straight face, "No, seriously. Fix the damn lawn-mower."

 

~

 

The Kaidonovskies were the last ones to leave--Sasha to go back to their apartment and make dinner, Aleksis to go to a second job at a warehouse--waving goodbyes from their truck as they pulled out of the driveway. 

The Becket brothers stood on the doorstep and waved them off, Yancy still clutching a mug of coffee. The Kaidonovskies' battered Jeep rounded the corner and passed the broken streetlamp, and they were gone, the red of their taillights fading into the murky twilight.

Raleigh closed the front door and turned the front light on, wondering what the Pentecost-Hansens were doing and feeling stupid for thinking about it.

"So, dinner?" Yancy asked.

"Uh...I could put a pizza in? Or warm up some of those little ravioli-things Sasha left?" Raleigh suggested.

"The pelmeni? I ate the last ones for breakfast." Yancy had the decency to look a little sheepish.

"Fuck." Raleigh said.  
They looked at each other. Yancy smirked; Raleigh groaned.   
"Spaghetti," they chorused.

Raleigh was the one who cooked, while Yancy sat at the table, surrounded by piles of paper, scribbling onto the yellow legal pad and occasionally picking at a calculator. Sometimes he'd make a pleased noise. Most of the time, though, he just sighed, his hand raking through his hair again and again.  
"That bad, huh?" he asked.

"Supplies aren't getting any cheaper," Yancy said, and his smile was sad.   
"You still worried we're gonna have to let someone go?" Raleigh asked.  
Yancy looked back at the papers all over the table, sighed, and shook his head.

"We fire someone, it's more work on the rest of us. We slow down, our regular people stop calling us for routine stuff--no. Bad enough _you_ have to be out there, with your arm..."

"Hey, come on, don't do that. It's not even that bad, most of the time, and you know it!" Raleigh said.  
Yancy didn't have a response to that. Just the same kind of sad, searching look he'd had on his face the day Raleigh had told him he'd joined up, too.

Raleigh stared back, trying to keep his face straight, trying not to look guilty or sad or anything but determined--as determined as he'd felt as an idiot nineteen-year-old throwing four years of his life away to follow in his brother's footsteps. 

"I'm gonna finish the spaghetti," Raleigh said, embarrassed, turning back to their tiny stove.  
They ate in silence, Yancy still stabbing at the calculator and writing one-handed. Raleigh washed the dishes with the silence on his shoulders like a weight.

Raleigh was on his way out of the kitchen, his hand on the wall, when Yancy spoke.  
"I wasn't trying to be an asshole. I just...worry about you. You know?"

Raleigh hesitated. He couldn't bring himself to look Yancy in the face, and so he half-turned his head and said, into the collar of his coat, "Yeah. I know. I worry about you, too."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was in revision hell for like three days. I hope it's okay...


	3. Dinner and Company

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some things are not as happy as they seem.  
> (On the other hand, some things are EXACTLY as happy as they seem.)
> 
> Mako is an unsuccessful spy; Chuck's mouth gets him in trouble; Stacker's perceptiveness weirds Raleigh right the fuck out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things are getting intense fast! (Sorry?) (As usual, it's semi-accidental...)  
> Comments will be treasured, saved, and read and re-read obsessively until the internet implodes.  
> Thank you for coming along on this journey with me!
> 
>  
> 
> (also, i know, i know, the military would never put siblings in the same group. i'm bending the rules here because Pacific Rim canonically bent the rules of reality, so...)  
> (SERIOUS EDIT! Holy wow, I JUST realized I left off the entire first chunk of this chapter. I was in a hurry when I posted it. I'm terribly sorry for the confusion it may have caused! I hope you enjoy reading the chapter in its entirety.)

"You're gonna get a wicked neck-ache, sitting like that," Chuck said, from behind her.  
Mako shushed him without looking away from the screen of her camera, her fingertip poised on the shutter button.

She was sitting backwards in a chair scooted all the way up to her window, her elbows on her knees and her chin on the chair's backrest, her arms holding the camera up to a slat in the Venetian blinds that covered the window. The blinds were closed enough that she wouldn't be visible from the outside, but that she still had a view down into the yard.

She was sitting stock-still, barely blinking, concentrating fiercely.  
"I don't care. I'm going to get a picture if it kills me."

She didn't have to look to know that Chuck was behind her, standing in the doorway with greatly-affected carelessness. She could also hear Max's collar tags jingling faintly, along with the dog's soft snuffling.

After awhile, she heard the soft noise of paws over the carpet, felt his wet nose brush gently against her bare ankle.

She reached down one-handed and rubbed his head, careful of the cone.  
Chuck sighed loudly from the doorway. 

Mako rolled her eyes (fighting a smile) and turned to look at him.  
"What's wrong?"  
"Nothing," he said, too quickly.  
"Hm." She paused. "If you're sure..." she said, and turned back to the window.

She zoomed the camera's focus in on the edge of their yard, the margin of trees where the other dogs often came and scratched around at the scrubby wild grass before marking everywhere.  
Still nothing. The only motion came from the wind, worrying the trees' branches and briefly tugging the grass flat.

She sighed and clenched her teeth.  
Behind her, she heard Chuck shuffle into the room and sit down on the bed.

"The fuck do you think that Yank weirdo was? The bloke who came with Tendo?" he asked, finally.  
"He told us," she murmured. "They work for the same landscaping company."

When Chuck was silent, she was patient. She waited for him to make his roundabout conclusions about what he wanted to say. 

"And why was he weird? Did he say something?"  
"He kept staring around at the house like he was casing the place," Chuck mumbled.  
"What?" She almost turned to look at him.  
"He did! And he was--he was too quiet. S'weird. Aren't Americans supposed to be loud and all that?"

Mako had nothing to say to that. She was concentrating so hard she could feel the sweat prickling at her scalp, but she didn't want to look away again.

"First time we see Tendo in _months_ , and he comes with some other bloke. I mean, what the _hell_." Chuck was complaining, whining, and she knew he'd flung himself down backwards over her bed.

"It didn't look like they were together like that," she said, "At least, not from what I saw."  
"They might not've been touchy-feely, but neither are Herc and dad--in public, anyway--" she heard a muffled thud as Chuck slapped at her duvet, "DAMN it!"

"If you're so worried he'll find someone else, why don't you just...tell Tendo how you feel?"  
"...I can't just DO that! What am I s'posed to do, grab 'im by his suspenders, sling him into a dip, and plant a big sloppy kiss on him?"

"No. But in that case, you could just keep beating up my mattress. I suppose that's also a logical course of action." she was trying to keep the laughter out of her voice.  
"I hate you. You know that?"

She actually laughed. "You always say that whenever I prove you wrong. Talk to Tendo. Ask him out! What could it hurt?"

 

~

 

Raleigh was dreaming. He was in their old house, walking down hallways that didn't make any sense.  
Everywhere on the walls there were pictures--he knew they were supposed to be pictures of his mother, Yancy, himself, and his dad, but they were all wrong, their faces smeared and unrecognizeable. He walked and walked, with weird gray light pouring into the windows from outside, trying to find a single picture where their faces weren't melting, and right as the dream began to tip into nightmare, he twitched awake.

His left arm was tingling, burning pain sparking along his nerves.  
He sat up, grunting, and made his hand into a weak fist. 

Agony crackled close to the bone in his shoulder and bicep, the pain spreading in burning fingers up the side of his neck, up almost to his ear. He winced, hissing through his teeth in pain, and kicked himself out of bed.

Yancy was fast asleep in his room down the hall; he padded barefoot past his brother's door, cradling his arm with his other, biting his lips.

In the bathroom he rested his hand on the cold porcelain of the sink--the cold only barely soothing the pain--and dug around in their medicine cabinet, reaching past Yancy's rows of pill bottles, hunting for his own.

He swallowed a single little chalky-white tablet with a mouthful of tap water and held onto the edge of the sink with his right hand, his knuckles yellow-white, his left arm alternately burning and numb.  
When he could straighten back up again, he shuffled back to his room, eased himself back down onto his bed like an old man, and lay there staring up at the white popcorn-plaster ceiling. 

He'd tried all the tricks to beat pain back--counting, meditating, ignoring it. He was well-acquainted with the last method, considering how long doctors had shrugged and told him that he was lucky he could still use his arm at all--doubly so, in that the pain wasn't constant. 

He thought about the time he'd broken his arm when he and Yancy were kids--how he'd tried not to cry; how, afterwards, Yancy had pointed out that it was badass of him, riding his bike back home one-handed, with his swollen arm curled close to his chest. Yancy had spent the entire ride talking him up, keeping him moving forward, goading him when he needed to.

The irony wasn't lost on him--it was his right arm he'd broken as a kid, and it had healed up just fine.  
His _left_ arm, though...

An hour later when the ringing doorbell woke him up, he sat up and flexed his left hand. When the only thing he felt was a faint tingle in his fingertips, he sighed in relief.

Tendo was standing on the doorstep when he opened the door, big pastry box balanced in one hand and a bagel already between his teeth.

"Mmn!" he said, and thrust the box at Raleigh.  
"Aw, thanks, man!"  
"Don't thank me yet. Do you guys have any of that good coffee left?" He stepped to one side to let the other man in.  
"The, uh, the Petey's?"  
"Peet's, you heathen. Got any?" Tendo was already sniffing the air, testing to see if he'd already made a pot.

His nose wrinkled when the smell he encountered was cold motor oil stench and not warm coffee aroma.  
"Jesus, what did they _do_ to that mower?" he groused.

Raleigh laughed a little, wiping sleep from his eyes.

"Actually, Cheung and me ended up reassembling it. Aleksis decided Hu and Jin needed some much-needed time in the garage, cleaning other stuff."  
"Smart choice," Tendo nodded. "So, about that coffee..."

 

"How do you _do_ that?" Raleigh said, into his cup.

"What?" Tendo asked. He followed Raleigh's glance over his shoulder, over to where Yancy was sitting at the kitchen table, pencil in one hand and yellow legal pad in the other, writing. A phone was wedged between the side of his face and his shoulder, and occasionally he would make understanding noises into it. A cup of coffee steamed on a cork coaster, a few inches from his right hand.

"I used to have to practically beat the shit out of him to get him out of bed in the morning. It was, like, my Thing. My mom used to catch me before school and send me back up to his room to get him up. But you just..." he trailed off and shook his head.

Tendo grinned crookedly and held up his mug. "Coffee, Raleigh. In coffee I trust."  
"Amen," he laughed. They toasted each other, clinking mugs.

Yancy set the phone back on its charger caddy and half-turned in his chair. "Hey, back there in the peanut gallery. Don't you guys have rounds to make?"

 

~

 

They were on their second house of the day--a huge, shambling once-palatial house with four flaking white pillars framing its doors and windows, and an elaborately-manicured front lawn, complete with topiary trees and a horseshoe-shaped pea-gravel driveway. 

The house was very nice--at first glance. A closer look showed rust bleeding around all the pretty wrought-iron window boxes, loose roof shingles, and cracks in the plaster around the door and all the windows. Around one of the windows, the plaster was an obvious--and very bad--patch job, in a mismatched color.

"You'd think, with their house looking like that, they'd stop spending so much on yard upkeep and fix the house," Tendo mumbled. 

They were both standing in the lush, green lawn, rebuilding a small, low brick wall containing three topiary trees trimmed to look like rabbits. Earlier, Raleigh had trimmed the topiary trees back into their animal shapes. Now, he shucked off one glove to wipe his forehead and gestured at the rabbits with a flourish and a grin.  
"You know how it is. Gotta keep up appearances!" 

Tendo snorted. "Yeah, well. They must figure that everyone who sees the place will be so dazzled with the yard, they won't notice the house. Plus, with houses like this, people think because they're _big_ , they're fancy. I guess." 

A moment later, he dug his phone out of his pocket. The phone was pinging softly, and he tapped at it a few times, and then he hummed, smiling.  
"Speaking of big houses...you wanna come to dinner with me?"

"Thought you were done dating business associates. After what happened with the Kaidonovskies..."

"Hey, hey, there was no no way for me to have planned to _not_ run into their ex. The guy's a DJ, for cryin' out loud! It was a _club_!" Tendo threw his hands wide. "Anyway, it's not a date. Keep it in your pants, Becket."

Raleigh laughed and flicked a handful of leaves at him.  
"Sure, man, totally. But seriously, though--yeah. I'll go with you."

 

~

 

Raleigh was beginning to think agreeing to go with Tendo was a mistake.  
"Aren't we gonna take some of our stuff?" Raleigh had asked.

Tendo had shaken his head. "Nah. This isn't business, just pleasure."  
That was what Tendo had said. 

It didn't mean Raleigh had been mentally prepared to end up eating dinner at his friend's rich ex-boss's ridiculously fancy house.

"Jesus, Tendo, how could you spring this on me?" Raleigh had muttered.  
Tendo's hand was already outstretched for the door.

"Figured you were tired of takeout leftovers and Russian food--not that the Kaidonovskies are bad cooks, and don't you tell either of 'em I said this, because I like my bones all unbroken, thanks."  
Raleigh had sighed, and checked his shoes _again_. "I _like_ Russian food."  
"Yeah, but you'll _love_ this."

That was all the warning he'd gotten that he'd end up in front of the kind of spread he'd _dreamed_ of back when he was in the Marines--poached salmon in butter sauce, mashed potatoes with chives, pan-glazed peas in a sauce he couldn't identify, but which he'd probably walk through liquid cement to eat again. He was sitting between Mako and Tendo and politely trying to not look as if he wanted to cream his pants or cry with happiness or both.

Stacker had spent the entire meal alternately stealing amused looks at Raleigh and talking to Tendo. Mako and Raleigh talked--mainly about mechanics, because she was studying engineering at the university in town. Herc had said some things, his voice pitched very low, to Chuck, whose venomous glare kept jumping between Raleigh and Tendo, but always, always settling on Raleigh.

Before he knew it, the plates were all empty--except Chuck's, because instead of eating, he'd been covertly sneaking little scraps off of it and away to parts unknown--Raleigh imagined the dog was probably living it up, too, down there under the table. 

"Well, that was beautiful and I'll probably have to have these pants let out," Herc said.  
Stacker said something in protest that was lost in Mako and Tendo's laughter.  
"I'd never deny my husband his favorite condiment," Stacker continued.

Herc straightened slightly, his thumbs tucked into his belt, and grinned at Stacker. "Don't think butter counts as a condiment, Stack."

At which Stacker shrugged. "Well. Better that than mayonnaise. We'll just have to work out more often."  
Herc gave him a slightly pleading look--Tendo guffawed--and Stacker amended, "I know a good tailor, love, relax."

Herc continued to grumble good-naturedly as stood up and collected his plate.  
"Oh, hey, let me help," Tendo said, and Raleigh could only look after him with a vaguely despondent face as Tendo, Mako, and Herc collected all the plates and silverware and disappeared around the corner, back into the kitchen.

Leaving Raleigh with Chuck and Stacker and no idea what to say.  
Chuck, by then, had abandoned all pretense and was just picking pieces of fish off with his fingers and handing them down to the dog. Raleigh could hear the wet smacking noises as the dog lapped the morsels off his hand.

Somehow the other man was doing this with a completely straight face, his glare still leveled at Raleigh.  
"So, Raleigh," Stacker said, and he turned to look at the older man, "Tendo tells me you're a veteran, as well."

Is that what you called that? Raleigh asked himself. He, personally, would have described himself as a (former) dumb-fuck kid chasing his hero big brother halfway across the world in a two-man mutual effort to prove that the Becket men weren't all shitheels. After what his dad had pulled, he'd felt they had a lot to make up for.

"Uh, yeah," he said.  
"Which branch of the forces did you serve in?"  
"I was a marine," he answered, and bit off the 'sir' that came into his mouth at the end, almost by rote.  
"Interesting," Stacker said.

"So, why'd they throw you out? Hope it wasn't anything too terrible."  
"Chuck," Stacker said, his voice disappointed.

Chuck looked embarrassed for all of two seconds. He fed another piece of fish to the dog.  
"Actually, I was honorably discharged. Me n' my brother both have Purple Hearts."  
Then it was Chuck's turn to look shocked--then embarrassed again.

Stacker's only show of surprise was to raise his eyebrows slightly. "I see. I'm very sorry."  
"What? Oh, no. He's--Yancy's still alive. We almost didn't make it, but, uh..." he trailed off.  
All right, he told himself. This is the part where the civvies expect you to play nice and tell them Good Things, to make them feel better. To get them to calm down and think you're All Right.

Don't tell them what it feels like to pull smoldering shrapnel out of your own arm and shoulder. Don't tell them you staggered in circles around the car whispering your brother's name over and over, knowing he was still trapped inside. Jesus Christ, don't tell them what you do when you realize those charred chunks scattered in the dirt alongside the road are-- _were_ \--your buddies. Don't tell them you didn't even have the presence of mind to radio for help before passing out from blood loss, right there in the dirt, your nose so close to one tire that you could smell its tarry, rubbery odor.

Tell them about the heat--about how every breath was like inhaling warm dryer lint and grit. Tell them about the way the sky was perfect cerulean, the color they show in magazines, the color the skies in America haven't been in decades. Tell them about the mountains, how there are almost no plants to be seen, and how in the foothills, little boys in cast-off American clothes from ten, twenty years ago stand in the middle of clusters of their goats and wave and seem so happy to see you, the American, the soldier. 

Raleigh didn't come back until he heard someone's voice, pitched at him.

"We didn't mean to pry," Stacker said, very gently, and then flashed a Look at Chuck.  
Who looked down at his plate, his hands both on the tabletop suddenly. He bowed his head.  
"'M gonna. Go and, er. Make sure Herc hasn't completely wrecked the kitchen." he mumbled, and then hurried from the room.

Raleigh caught a glimpse of a brown-and-white bulldog waddling after him, a medical cone wobbling on his neck.

"I am very sorry," Stacker said, again. "I didn't mean to bring up bad memories. I hope your brother is well."

"Yeah, sorry. That's...sometimes I just..." Raleigh trailed off, cleared his throat, and soldiered on. "Yeah, my brother's doin' pretty good now," Raleigh said. "We came back stateside and once we were both cleared as better, we decided, you know, we didn't have much more than our parents' house. Figured we might as well start a business. We do okay."

He felt like an idiot. Here he was, explaining his 'business' of clipping other people's hedges and tiling their kitchens for them to a man who was probably some corporate executive with enough money behind his name to buy Pacifica twenty times over, and still laugh it off.

He was surprised, though. Most of the time, once people heard he had a medal--that he'd been injured in what was technically combat--they'd start getting excited and try to ask for details. Where was he shot? Were they surrounded? How did he survive? And, most pressingly, how many people did he shoot?  
He'd heard all of those in every possible iteration.

Stacker didn't ask any of those questions.  
He just looked at Raleigh with a pensive face, his fingers laced together and his chin resting on his thumbs. 

Raleigh started to wonder if he expected him to say something, when Stacker spoke.  
"How long have you and Tendo known each other?"

"Oh, man. Uh, five years, I think? Yeah, about five or six years. He and Yancy--my brother--go way back."  
"Hmm." he sounded so completely neutral that Raleigh opened his mouth to start to say something, then closed it again when he realized no intelligent words were going to come out.

He tried not to look too obviously grateful when everyone else came back into the room.  
Stacker said nothing else, only continued to look thoughtful in a way Raleigh didn't rightly understand. 

He was still thinking about that look the older man had given him, even as the Pentecost-Hansens waved them out the front door--even after Tendo revved his ancient truck's engine, even after they'd long left the house behind.


	4. Work and Complications

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plot thickening devices begin to emerge!  
> Chuck's affections are thwarted. The unseen animal menace is revealed!

"Un-FUCKING-believable!" Chuck snarled.  
He came back up with a vicious jab, throwing his shoulder into it; the punching bag wobbled, the chain clanking.  
Mako glanced up from where she was doing sit-ups.  
"You don't believe what?" She asked.   
Chuck glared at her, anger so white-hot he wanted to scream.  
He didn't, though, because he wasn't fucking _twelve_ , and he knew that hollering at his sister wouldn't do a damn thing to make himself feel better about his Tendo Problem.  
Well. Now, actually, his Raleigh Problem, because even _HE_ realized he'd crossed the line.  
"You should apologize to Raleigh," she said.  
"I wasn't--I didn't know! How the FUCK!" --another vicious punch-- "Was I supposed to know? I mean, I--"  
"You already know that whatever you meant doesn't matter." She said. "Father told me you seriously upset him."  
Chuck paused, his face screwed up incredulously.   
"'Upset'? I 'upset' him? Jesus, you make it sound like we were a couple of nursery-school kids and I pushed him off the slide or something," he muttered.  
"That _is_ the level of maturity you were showing."   
"How was I to know?"  
"You always do this, Chuck," she sighed.   
She resumed her sit-ups.  
He made an incoherent, frustrated noise and grabbed the punching bag and just _shook_ it, his knuckles aching in the gloves, keeping time with his pounding pulse.  
Finally, when his hands couldn't take anymore, he stepped away, panting, and stared down at her.  
She was fluidly, effortlessly doing sit-ups, her eyes open and slightly unfocused, as if she was looking into the middle-distance between herself and the wall.  
Somehow, she was managing to look perfect even with her hair back behind a stretchy headband, and sticking in sweaty tendrils to her neck and forehead. She was zen, like Stacker, though--nothing ever seemed to ruffle either of their feathers.  
He had no idea how they did it.  
The two of them--he and Mako--were in what had once been the house's second living room, which had been converted into the family workout room by popular complaint--the nearest gym was almost an hour away, and no one had the time or energy to drive that far.  
(They very diplomatically never pointed out how they _knew_ how often their fathers' 'sparring matches' in the home gym turned into them making out with the one pinning the other to the mats they kept in the corner. Because they were _adults_ , and if their parents wanted to diddle each other in random parts of the house--well, it _was_ technically _their_ house...)  
Chuck's knuckles were stinging fiercely, even with the tape, even with the gloves, and the spaces between his fingers were becoming raw.  
Finally, he ducked his head, sighing.   
"I know, all right. I'm a colossal fuck-up when it comes to relationships. Still, even _I_ didn't expect to put my foot in it _this_ bad."  
She shook her head. He watched as she finished her last set and stood up without saying anything to start her cool-down stretches.  
Well, that answered _that_ question. No more sisterly pity _or_ sisterly advice.   
He turned back to the bag and started up again. But he wasn't even punching with any kind of form, at this point--just whaling on the bag, venting his fury through his fists.  
"And I--" SLAM "--fucking HAD--" SLAM "--to insult him! Fucking blond Yank with his stupid fucking FACE like a fucking Labrador retriever turned human, god DAMN it, and OF FUCKING COURSE he's a veteran--A DECORATED VETERAN, MAKO--Jesus Christ, what the fuck am I supposed to DO. How was I supposed to know? Bloody he--"  
He aborted his rant when he looked over at her and saw that Mako had stretched out flat on the floor and was breathing slowly, rhythmically, her eyes closed.  
"Mako. Are you seriously trying to sleep right now?"  
She opened both eyes and managed to look offended and amused at the same time.  
"Are you being serious?"  
"Are _you_?"  
She sighed, rolling her eyes, and shook her head. After a moment, she patted the mat next to herself with one hand.  
"Come lay down here. Take a break."  
He considered the reprieve, considered her kindness and the break in his bad luck.   
"I dunno...I'll stiffen up n' get cramps."  
She scoffed softly. "If you keep going at the bag that way, you're either going to bruise your hands, or burst the bag. I don't think even Stacker will buy you another one this time."  
So, annoyed, knowing his legs were going to lock up and his shoulders were going to feel like cement, he stretched out beside her, feeling gangly and huge and idiotic. And incandescent with helpless, suppressed feelings-he-couldn't-identify.  
Mako folded her hands on her stomach, and regarded the ceiling.  
'Talk to me, Chuck,' she was saying, in her way of not-saying things, only sort of implying them and letting him pick up the slack.  
"First! Because I know Herc's going to chew my ass about it when they get back--I know, I've gotta apologize to Raleigh."  
"Mmmhmm," Mako said, patiently.  
He paused a moment, then rushed ahead, "But they've got to be together."  
"Why?"  
"Because--because--! Tendo brought him over _twice_ , didn't he, and--" he waved one of his arms, his knuckles stinging worse when he spread his fingers, gesturing up at the ceiling. "And come the fuck on, _look_ at Tendo! How could anyone _not_ want him?"  
Mako sighed. "The first time he 'brought him over', it was for work. Remember? And Raleigh doesn't seem to feel that way about Tendo."  
"What." Chuck muttered. He rolled onto his side and stared at her, disbelieving.  
"I spent the whole night talking to him while you glared daggers at him. He's actually very nice."  
"Did he mention anything about their relationship?"  
She smirked and shook her head.  
"You're really amazing, Chuck."  
"Come on! COME ON, MAKO, DON'T BE LIKE THIS! Tell me!"   
She sighed, pushing away his needling hand, and said, "Why don't _you_ ask him? You know, after you apologize for insulting him."  
"Oh, come _on_ , Mako. I already said I--"  
"You say that _now_. If I remind you later, you'll just roll your eyes! I _mean_ it, Chuck. I can't believe you're still fixated on Tendo even after you insulted his friend to his face! What makes you think he would want to date you now, after how you acted towards Raleigh?"  
That time he actually _was_ embarrassed into silence.  
"If you'd actually tried _talking_ to Raleigh, instead of rushing straight to _hating_ him because of something _you_ believe--even without evidence--then you'd have realized that not once did he mention himself as being in that kind of relationship with Tendo."   
Chuck stayed silent, and felt so guilty he couldn't look at her. He picked at the cuff of one of his gloves.  
"We talked about where he's traveled, and what he's seen. He said photography was his favorite hobby. He even told me he prefers gardening to landscaping. Can you guess what he _didn't_ mention?" She looked at him, her eyes narrow and annoyed.  
"I don't even know what to say," he mumbled. "I'm not...good at any of this stuff. _you_ know that. What am I supposed to _do_ with that?"  
She sat up, then, and fixed him with a Pentecost Family Stern Look.  
"You're supposed to take it and put two and two together."  
He just felt chastised and helpless. He kicked himself up into a sitting position, too, his elbows on his knees and his head hung.  
It took him a minute to find the right thing to say, and when he finally did, he sighed first.  
"How can you tell?"  
Mako seemed appeased. She stopped talking in sister-riddles and just came out with, "Not _once_ during the entire conversation did he mention he and Tendo having a relationship. If they were a couple, he would have said something. But all he talked about was their work together."  
Chuck stared down at the mat they were sitting on, his face screwed up as he thought. He still felt like shit from that--ribbing the guy the way he had. Honestly, he hadn't mean to go that far--he'd meant what he'd said as a joke.  
Still, he found that accidentally behaving like an asshole (and then, when people took him seriously) pretending to actually _be_ one was a pretty great strategy for bluffing your way through life. He figured he wouldn't stop now.   
He'd find another way to covertly apologize to the other man. Maybe split a six pack of some of Herc's nice beer with him, he thought.   
"So...you think I have a chance?"  
Mako sighed again and rolled her eyes. "Not if you keep going on like this, you don't," she said.  
She stood up, stretched her legs, and padded out of the room.  
Chuck watched her go, envious--and then stood up, feeling stiff as an old man, his knees stiff and his hands solidly aching.   
"Should I not have invited him over? Should I have taken him on an actual going-out date? IS THAT WHAT YOU MEANT?" He shouted through the house after her.  
Her response was muffled through the walls. "I don't know! You'd better think of something fast, though, because they'll be here soon!"

~

Tendo heaved the last brick down onto the stack on the cart below, pausing to wipe his forehead.  
The other man had rolled his sleeves up, too, and his bare forearms gleamed faintly with sweat in the late-morning light.  
"Should've asked 'em to start sooner," Tendo said, and straightened up.   
He was standing in the bed of his geriatric gray truck, his gray work-clothes dusted with paler-gray streaks of brick dust. (One day, Raleigh told himself, he was going to ask Tendo what he used on his hair. The pompadour wasn't so much as wilted, and they'd been unloading bricks for ten minutes. He was fighting to tamp down jealousy, knowing his own hair was already flattened to his temples and the back of his neck with sweat. One day he was also going to ask Tendo about his work clothes. Work clothes for Tendo translated to a gray chambray button-up with a Pacifica logo patch on the front pocket, the sleeves rolled up past his biceps, over a pair of loose faded black jeans cuffed high over his scuffed taffy-colored workboots. Raleigh honestly had no idea how some of the people he worked with made manual labor look so good, while he blundered around in lumpy khaki everything.)  
"Yeah, well. We'll do all right," Raleigh said.   
He believed that, too, until he knocked on the door and Chuck--the _wrong_ Australian--answered.  
The Australian man looked Raleigh up and down, his face completely flat, and started to say something when he was interrupted--Mako shouldered around him to greet them.  
Her hair was wet, combed back from her face, and she was wearing all blue everything: blue jeans, blue t-shirt, the black boots with blue laces.  
She smiled when she saw Raleigh, grinned bigger when she saw Tendo behind him.  
"We brought the bricks..." Raleigh said.  
"I'll go open the gate."

It took them another fifteen minutes to transfer the bricks to the back, by which point the sun was high in the sky and Raleigh was privately wishing he could crawl someplace dark and cool and just hide.  
They'd stacked them on the paved patio, close to the side of the house, where he noticed shards of broken-up terra-cotta pots piled in a wooden trash-bin. He could tell that there were probably a dozen pots, broken beyond all gluing, ranging from tiny pint ones up to nice, big five gallon ones.  
He wanted to ask about the pots, but Mako was talking with Tendo and Chuck seemed to constantly be at his elbow, eyeing him silently with a strange look on his face.  
If he was trying to goad Raleigh into making the first remark, it wasn't going to happen. So Raleigh kept his mouth shut.  
Chuck joked with Tendo as he helped them with the bricks, and Mako kept giving Chuck Serious Looks that Raleigh couldn't decipher.  
It was shaping up to be another normal--if somewhat strained--day, when the barking and snarling started.  
Mako shook her head, motioned for them to be quiet, and led them all to the edge of the yard, from where they could see down the steep slope and into the neighboring back yard.  
"Jeeze--how many dogs do they _have_? Do they _always_ sound like that?" Raleigh asked.   
Mako shrugged. "Only when they fight. The rest of the time they just bark and howl."  
Raleigh gave her an incredulous look; she crossed her arms over her chest and laughed, sarcastic.   
"I'm serious! They're really terrible. Believe me, we _need_ this wall."  
"Ya think they're loud enough?" Tendo said. "Exhibit A for why I am _not_ a dog person."   
"Oh, yeah, 'cause everyone knows how nice 'n quiet cat fights are," Chuck retorted, and they all laughed.   
After a moment, though, they all fell silent.  
Raleigh felt his gut clench uncomfortably at what he saw below.  
In the yard below, two huge dogs were lunging and snapping at each other, while a handful of others circled, whining and yapping.  
Chuck shook his head. "Fucking bastards, letting their dogs get that way."  
Raleigh looked at him, surprised. Chuck seemed genuinely angry--and not at the dogs.   
He thought about the bulldog with the cone around its neck, Chuck's face as he made kissy noises down at him.   
Things clicked neatly into place.  
Mako was the first one to step away, clearing her throat to get their attention.   
"...It's getting hot. Anyone want some water before you get started?"  
And after they all chorused Yes-es, Mako walked back towards the house--though, not before giving Chuck a last Very Serious Look.  
Tendo remembered the shovels, and he and Chuck went to get them, and for the second time, Raleigh was left alone with a lot of space and nothing but himself and his thoughts to fill them.  
It didn't last long.  
Mako came back out into the yard with a metal tray laden with tall glasses of water.   
"Thanks," he sighed.  
They both winced when there was a particularly loud yap, and the snarling came to an abrupt cease.  
"Man, I don't know _how_ you guys deal with that. Do they do that a lot? Is that, like, and everyday thing?"  
She nodded, her eyes sliding sideways towards the edge of the yard, her entire body telegraphing its annoyance.  
"The neighbors act like they own the whole lot, too," Mako said. "Their fence is full of holes, too, so the dogs get out a lot. They come over here all the time and mess up our yard."  
"Jeeze," Raleigh said.   
"Yeah. I know you saw the broken pots. They were going to be our container garden. My father Stacker and I planted some things one morning, and when we came home at the end of the next day, half the pots were shattered, all the plants were chewed up, and there were big paw prints everywhere. When my father tried to tell the neighbors, they wouldn't even open their door!  
"Jesus. Did you guys call the animal cops? The humane society, I mean?"  
"I looked into that. I don't think we have a case; the yard is open, technically, and they don't seem to be abusing the dogs, just...neglecting them. _They're_ the ones abusing _us_!" she said, and laughed. The sound was sharp, and more annoyed than happy, but Raleigh felt himself smile anyway.  
"Just a thought."  
"I know. Thank you."  
They were quiet for awhile, sipping their drinks, before Mako stiffened beside him.  
"Look. They're feeding them."  
Down in the other house's yard, he could see the mud-and-dust-streaked glass doors slide open. One of the dogs stuck their head inside and got a slap, from the sound of things; but he couldn't see the person inside, just their arm, in a gray sweatshirt sleeve, as they pushed a large stainless-steel tray full of kibble out onto the concrete stoop.  
"Not exactly AKC-recommended treatment," Raleigh mumbled.  
"No," Mako said.  
They watched the other dogs come out of their hiding places in the yard, one by one, and start towards the tray. The dog nearest the door, the one that had gotten the slap in the face, was currently wolfing food out of the tray, and began growling at the others as they advanced.  
"Sometimes I hear them yelling the dogs' names. That's the one they named Scunner," Mako muttered. "I think he's the one who attacked our dog Max."  
The dog was big and ugly, an overbred Rottweiler mix with ears docked down to two stiff little points.   
"Those two," she nodded her head at the others, indeterminate breeds, but built big and mean-looking, "Are Clawhook and Knifehead. The big shaggy one with the gray muzzle is Trespasser. I think he's the oldest, but all that means is he snaps at the others more often. Oh, the gray one with the blue collar is Otachi. They keep making her have puppies...I think they're selling them."  
Raleigh sighed in disgust. "Poor little guys are almost definitely going to bad homes, too," he muttered.  
She made a noise of agreement. "There's not much we can do. We can't prove anything, and no law officials can go over there unless they have a warrant, so..." and she shrugged.  
"You kids still watching the local wildlife?" Tendo called, and then he and Chuck were back, Tendo carrying shovels and Chuck pushing the wheelbarrow.   
Chuck, Raleigh noticed, looked both calm and mortified at the same time--staring very carefully straight ahead.  
He stopped with the wheelbarrow beside the cube-stack of bricks, propped it up, and made an obvious effort to look anywhere but at Tendo.  
"Gonna go take care of the dishes before dad and the old man get home. I, ah," he said, and looked at Tendo with an unreadable expression on his face.  
Then he turned and practically ran to the door, stopping only to bend over and pick up Max--who was waiting on the other side of the glass for him--before disappearing inside.  
Raleigh looked at Tendo and had enough time to see the older man look pained.  
He cocked his head, his mouth falling open, and Tendo shook his head once, his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth a flat line.  
Raleigh raised his eyebrows, shrugged his good shoulder, and said, "Well, time to start work on our anti-dog wall."  
Mako had watched the entire exchange thoughtfully, her chin tucked low, and she turned and went the direction Chuck had gone.  
She stopped with one foot on the doorstep to turn back. "If you get thirsty and want more drinks, just knock!"  
Raleigh grinned and nodded; Tendo just nodded.  
When the door closed and they saw the slats of the vertical blinds slide back in place, Raleigh turned back to Tendo.  
"What just happened?"  
Tendo sighed. "I just turned Chuck down."  
Then it was Raleigh's turn to look mortified. "What?"  
"Yeah. I've known how he felt for awhile now, it's just...you know how I am."  
"Man." Raleigh said, "You tell 'im?"   
"No...figured I'd let him down easy. I just told him he wasn't my type."  
"Shit, man."  
"Yeah."   
And they were silent for a moment. Finally, Tendo sighed again, and handed Raleigh a shovel.  
He didn't say anything else for a long time. Neither did Raleigh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is anyone still reading this?
> 
>  
> 
> If you are, please help me come up with chapter titles. These are killing me.


	5. Blundering Closer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chuck is oblivious to his own obviousness. Mako continues to be supportive and generally too smart for all the extra mess. Have some reasons to worry about Tendo!

The sun was high in the sky when Tendo shucked off his gloves and called it.  
They rearranged some of the bricks in the big stack to make impromptu seats, where they sat and ate lunch.  
"Swear to god," Raleigh said, after swallowing a mouth full of BLT, "The _ONLY_ thing I like about this state is that everywhere you go, there's a Subway."  
Tendo was eating something that looked like the mutant child of a salad, a veggie burger, and a sandwich. He managed a laugh, licked hot sauce off the back of his hand.  
"Aww. You don't like our weather? How's about the mountains? And you haven't even been to a beach yet!"  
"Okay, three things: there kind of isn't weather. I feel like I'm inside a gigantic dryer all the time. The mountains? I dunno, they're big. And the beach--okay, okay, maybe. _Maybe_ the beach." Raleigh paused, then added, "With the right people."  
"You saying we should arrange a company picnic at the beach?"  
"Huh. Actually, that sounds kind of like a great idea. Remind me to run that by Yancy later."  
And Tendo laughed again. "Gunning for disaster? 'Cause that's what's sure to happen, with this group."  
Raleigh snorted, shaking his head. "Ahhh, well. At least in this place the view's nice. Even if everything is brown and beige ninety percent of the time."   
He pulled a paperback-sized sketchbook out of his backpack and started to doodle, sandwich held in one hand.   
He was looking at the hills, at the mountains, and he pulled a nub of pencil out of the slot in the back of the sketch-journal and started to doodle.  
"See something good?" Tendo asked.  
"The trees and the hills," Raleigh murmured, his hand still moving.  
There was the slightest breath of wind, rustling the trees; beyond the trees, visible between the two of them, the brown hills, the water-colored sky beyond. From where he was sitting, the trees stood to the left of the hills, the horizon seeming abrupt and close. A pale, thin hand of clouds were stretched over the hills, high in the air.  
He was so into detailing the trees against that skyline that he didn't realize he had an audience until he heard Tendo murmuring.  
"...he does that sometimes."  
"Huh?" he said, sitting upright suddenly.  
Mako was to his side, holding a sweating water bottle.  
"The lady was saying she likes your pictures," Tendo said, in an affected drawl, and Raleigh rolled his eyes at him, and smiled up at Mako.  
"You're very good," she said. Then, smirking, she nudged his side and said, "I thought you said you only did photography!"   
"Heh, yeah, well. It's not like I can lug my camera everywhere. A sketchpad, though...you can fit the little ones just about anywhere, and all you need is a spare minute..."  
She was staring down at the page, fascinated, occasionally glancing back up at the hills for comparison.  
"You...wanna see?" he offered, and she nodded, smiling wider.  
He handed her the sketchbook and watched, slightly nervously, as she began leafing through it, rapt.  
"It's not much, really," Raleigh said. "Just some stuff I jot down whenever I have a moment. A lot of my other journals are stuff I wrote or drew while I was with my brother on base in Alaska..."  
"These are very good. Do you submit your work anywhere?"  
He grinned, uncertain, and started to laugh. "No! No, I mostly do it for myself. It, uh. It helps me sort stuff out, you know?"  
She nodded, humming.  
"Where's this one from?" she asked, and showed him a drawing of a tall, narrow cabin, the sky behind it tinged a faint blue. The cabin's timber was gray-brown with age, and there was a thick cluster of pine trees behind it, their limbs laden with thick snow.  
"That was from when we lived way up north with my grandparents. They had this cabin, you know, kind of on the edge of the town where they lived. At night, sometimes, we'd hear wolves out in the woods."  
"Did anything happen?" Mako asked.  
"With the wolves? Nah. They used to raise hell howling all night, that was pretty much it. We moved to Anchorage next."  
He carefully decided not to mention that the reason they'd had to pack themselves into an ancient, tiny three-bedroom cabin with his grandparents was because his dad had abandoned them, and his mother couldn't make the payments on their house alone. His other, less-than-poetic memories of the place had been sleeping in a sleeping bag stuffed full of blankets for warmth, and his lips and nose chapping so badly the skin cracked and bled.  
She flipped the page and there, spreading across the next two, was something he'd written down about it.  
She turned the page quickly. "Oh! I won't read it if you don't want me to--"  
"It's all right," he heard himself say. "It's nothing too personal."  
A moment later they heard the door slide open, and Herc stepped out.  
"Tendo, do you have a moment? Stacker wanted to ask you something about building a patio..."  
And Tendo was crumpling the paper wrapper that had held his sandwich, and following Herc inside.  
Raleigh waited until she saw the blinds fall back in place before looking back at Mako.  
"Hey, so--not to be rude or weird or anything, but...what's up with your brother? He's been--I know you're not his keeper or anything--but he's been treating me like I shot his dog since we first met."  
Mako hesitated, glancing back at the house. He followed her glance to one of the upper-story windows, the one on the western side, and saw the curtains were closed.  
"Tendo turned Chuck down...Chuck liked Tendo for a long time. He just never acted on it, until now." She paused.   
"So...Chuck's mad at me because..." Raleigh trailed off.   
Mako just looked at him, silent, expecting, waiting until _HE_ put the pieces in place.  
Raleigh's smile grew huge, before he burst into laughter.  
"Oh, holy crap, he thinks we're together! No. No, no, no--not at _ALL_ , man. You tell him--well, first tell him Tendo and me are best friends and that's it--and then tell him that I, uh, don't have what Tendo's looking for." Raleigh paused, and scratched his left arm absently. "Neither does he."  
Mako looked at him curiously. "What do you mean?"  
"Tendo's poly...he mostly dates couples, though. So, uh," Raleigh chuckled a little, "Unless Chuck can miraculously produce a wonderful boyfriend so Tendo can fall in love with both of them, it's not gonna happen."  
And then it was Mako's turn to grin unexpectedly, to laugh.  
"That would never happen," she said. "Chuck is terrible with people!"  
"Yeah, well. Even if he had a boyfriend and they wanted to try something, there's not really a guarantee. Tendo...he keeps dating couples who don't get what he wants. They always come to a point where one of them thinks he's trying to steal the other away from them, and then the whole relationship goes belly-up. 'Cept in one case, where he broke it off because a guy threatened to knife him if he kept seeing this couple," Raleigh amended.  
Mako looked at Raleigh wide-eyed, and seemed to wait for him to grin and tell her he was joking.  
"You're serious?" she asked, her eyebrows rising.  
He was still smirking, but he was shaking his head. "Yeah, I know. Sounds like something out of a bad romantic comedy. It's true, though. Guy was, like, a Russian gangster-turned-musician, an' he seemed like the type to actually follow up on threats, so Tendo decided to play it safe."  
"Oh, my god! That's terrible!"  
"Yeah. Well, you talk to Tendo a lot, right?"  
"Yes, of course. For a long time, he's been like another brother to me."   
"So then you heard about how that thing with Alison and her boyfriend went?"  
Mako nodded.   
"Okay, the sad thing about _that_ relationship? Tendo met the guy first! _he_ was the one who wanted to try a three-person relationship. Then he started getting jealous of how well Tendo got along with Alison, so _he_ called the whole thing off."  
"Hmm." Mako nodded again. "That's so sad..."  
"Yeah. Tendo's a good guy, he deserves better...I just...I don't know how to help."  
"Tell him you see what he's going through. The next time something like that happens, speak up immediately. Tendo is always really direct, so I think he'll understand." She nodded.  
Raleigh brightened a little. "Thanks. Hey--tell Chuck? What I said, I mean. About me and Tendo not being together. I'd rather not have the guy hate my guts forever, you know, over a misunderstanding. I'd, uh, I'd tell him myself, but I don't think he wants to hear it from me."  
She smiled, again, the smile of perfect understanding, and nodded.  
Tendo came back out a moment later, looking much happier. Raleigh started to hope he'd talked to Chuck, but what came out of Tendo's mouth was, "Looks like I might have just scored more work for Pacifica! Stacker says if he likes the way the wall goes up, he might contract us again to build a patio!"  
Raleigh was about to congratulate him, and almost on cue, they could hear the growling and snarling start up again.  
Tendo grimaced.  
"We should really get back to work," he said.  
Mako started to hand the sketchbook back to Raleigh, who waved it off.   
"Give it back to me later, before we leave. You can finish looking through it." 

~

It was late when Chuck finally dragged himself downstairs--an hour or so after he heard Tendo's truck crackling over the gravel and leaving their yard--still feeling like a steer carcass that had been trussed up and scraped out.  
Herc and Stacker were sitting on the couch, practically in each other's pockets, laughing at some awful cheesy Godzilla ripoff that was showing on tv.   
Mako was sitting on the cement edge of the raised hearth, cross-legged, with a half-assembled Gundam model balanced on one leg and the instructions on the other. Occasionally, she would pause and glance up at the screen and watch, wide-eyed, until either the directions or the model started to slide off her legs and she would remember what she was doing.  
Stacker looked up from the TV when he noticed him, and Chuck half-wanted to sprint back upstairs before Stacker could ask him any meaningful questions, which were the only kind he asked, really. And Chuck couldn't handle anything right now.  
Instead, he said, "Are you all right, Chuck?"  
Chuck cleared his throat and clenched his jaw and said, "Yeah," and if his voice was raspy and wavered, no one said anything.  
The three of them watched him, though, as he walked to the fridge and pulled it open.  
With their eyes boring into his back, he straightened, can of soda in hand, and muttered, "What? A bloke can't get something to drink in his own kitchen without everyone staring?"  
Stacker made one of those rumbling noises he made when he was thinking and not exactly happy or mad.   
"You should come watch this with us. S'got everything you like: visual effects are awful, sound effects complete rubbish. It's actually hilarious; might take your mind off things." Stacker offered.  
And, all right, since everyone was just going to casually _acknowledge it_ , but no one was going to _talk about it_ , he decided _he_ would.  
"So. Did you all know?" he gestured with his empty hand.  
Stacker tilted his head a little and shrugged the shoulder that wasn't under Herc's arm.  
Herc gave him one of those sorry, sad smiles he was good at offering when he couldn't say anything, which was most of the time, for him, and it was like the knife in Chuck's chest was twisting slowly, slowly.  
He started to turn away when Stacker continued, "Chuck, don't run and hide; you're disappointed, you're upset. Just sit with us a minute. It might make you feel better, if you're out of your room for a bit."  
And yeah, okay, he rolled his eyes. He even stole the blanket the old men had over their legs for good measure--expertly dodging Herc's attempted swats with a throw pillow--and then sat too close to Mako on the cement hearth, Max scrambling up beside him. But instead of giving him an annoyed look, she kind of smiled at him, even elbowed him gently in the side.  
He huffed a little, and tried to smile back. His face wasn't working with him, though, and he still felt like he'd swallowed a handful of shredded steel wool, but she seemed to get the gist.  
"Better than bursting the seams on your punching bag," she said. "Remind me to tell you something important later."  
He grunted to acknowledge he was listening. As for his much-abused punching bag, he wasn't inclined to feel either way. Someone had hidden his gloves.  
There was a stack of Mako's textbooks behind her, with a small black book on top. While she was staring at the tv screen he plucked it from where it was and started flipping through it.  
There were a bunch of photos pasted onto the first couple of pages--an old cabin somewhere, pine trees dense around it; trees leaned out over a lake, their reflections on the sun-gilded surface weird and distorted. From there it branched into drawings, really lifelike birds with their shadows stretching beneath them on the page, three black-and-brown goat kids playing on a rock. There was an entire page dedicated to sketches of dogs' faces, some finished and shaded, others barely sketched out.   
A note beneath one of the dogs--a heavy-jowled Saint-Bernard-looking mutt--read, 'this guy has _terrible_ breath!'.  
He chuckled a little, in spite of himself.  
Max nudged his arm with his nose, and then again with one paw, and he scratched the dog's side.  
"Hey, Mako," he mumbled, "Where'd you get this book?"  
But she was re-reading the instructions for her model and didn't hear him.  
He shrugged inwardly and kept reading.  
"Don't worry, handsome," he whispered to Max. "Let's find one that looks like you, hey?"

~

It was even later and he wasn't even pretending to try to sleep.  
Instead, he sat on his bed and stared at the walls and sulked, because realistically, there was nothing else to do.   
Couldn't even go for a walk; there actually were coyotes running around.  
He was doing the Thing he did when he was feeling down, which was to pile his comics around himself and read them to pieces, literally. A battered, much-loved Batman omnibus was propped open on the coverlet near his right knee; stacked beside the bed he had back-issues of Batwoman and more Batman, all of them ratty from how often he read them.  
"This is the worst holiday." Chuck mumbled.  
Max licked his nose and sighed from deep in his chest. He was seriously engaged in Chuck-watching, which was his favorite thing, next to Find Stacker's Socks.   
He made a happy snort and waggled his butt.   
"Yeah, you're happy 'cause you're a dog. All your friends are at that nice park Dr. Geiszler told us about. Plus, it's easy for you to meet people. You walk up, give the other dog's ass a good sniff, he sniffs yours, boom! You've known each other for years. Wish it was that easy--you walk up, check out a bloke's rear end, he checks out yours, you both decide, Not bad, hey? Meanwhile, I can't even open my mouth without stuffing my foot into it," Chuck continued.  
He rolled over and grabbed Max by his head, smooshing the soft skin of his jowls between his fingers.  
Max wagged his butt and huffled, blinking his ridiculous big dog eyes. Normally the confused look on his face would have gotten Chuck cracking up.   
Now, he just sighed and rubbed the dog's ears.  
"This was supposed to be a better year," Chuck said.  
Max whuffled and wagged his butt a little harder.  
Chuck released his head and scratched his side instead, the dog rolling over and kicking one leg in the air.   
"Had everything planned. Take some time off, get a job, find a boyfriend..." he gestured at the ceiling. "Now all I've got's slack time I don't want."  
He sighed and went from scratching to petting, looking at Max--who looked back at him upside-down, the plastic cone bent awkwardly. He smiled and almost laughed. Finally, he sighed and laid back against the headboard of his bed, staring across at nothing--at the curtains drawn back to give a view of the bruise-colored sky and the wash of stars.  
Someone knocked softly on his door.   
He half-sat up, grabbing Max's collar before he could bound off the bed.  
"Yeah! Come in."  
Mako pushed the door open just enough to step inside, and shut it silently.  
"You're not asleep?" She asked.  
He gestured around at his room, the desk lamp on, the very-abused Batman omnibus spread open near his bent knee.  
"Obviously not."  
She sighed and rolled her eyes. "You know what I mean. I came because I just remembered the important thing I wanted to tell you."  
Chuck sighed and gently toed the omnibus off the bed. It fell beside the stack of similarly-battered comics, it pages splaying open.  
Mako came in and sat cross-legged where it had been, her elbows on her knees.  
For a long time she just looked at him, until he threw up his hands.  
"Okay! What did you want to say?"  
"It has to do with Tendo."  
He started to tell her he didn't want to hear it, hating the way his heart did a stupid little jump, hating the way his entire body was suddenly tingling with excitement. Just from her saying his _name_ , for Christ's sake. He told himself to get a hold of himself. It wasn't as if the news could be good, he thought.  
"Yeah. What."  
"I talked to Raleigh. Don't make that face! He told me that he and Tendo aren't in a relationship. Tendo is polyamorous and only dates couples. He specifically asked me to tell you that, so you don't hate him because Tendo turned you down. There. Now, the next important thing that needs to be said needs to happen face-to-face, because I'm tired of playing messenger-pigeon!"  
He stuffed his fists into his armpits and glared at the wall to his right, trying not to be a massive baby and mostly failing.  
"Chuck?"  
His throat felt like he'd swallowed a lump of hot lead. He managed to croak, "Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Mako."  
He felt Mako stand, and a moment later her arms were a cradle around his shoulders, her chin on top of his head.  
"I'm sorry, Chuck."  
He made a really gross inarticulate noise into her collarbone.   
She patted his back, let him withdraw without a word. On her way to the door, she whispered, "Good night."  
"Yeah."  
He waited until she'd left to bury his face in his hands.  
Max whined and nudged his arm and he heard a soft, papery shifting. There was a thump, and he looked up.  
When he looked over, Max was looking over the edge of the bed, down at the black book, which had fallen pages-down on the carpet.  
He wiped his face and thumped his head against the wooden headboard again, wiping his eyes a final time. A moment later he picked it back up, flipped to the page with the dog sketches, and started reading again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope I haven't made an ass of myself with the way I've presented Tendo's sexuality. I myself am not polyamorous, but I see Tendo as being able to be so. I did quite a bit of research! Not that that means I still can't embarrass myself. So. Disclaimer here. Sorry if I did this completely wrong and offended you!
> 
> Also, sorry for the sporadic updates...real life is interfering pretty badly right now...everything from the holidays to car accidents. So thank you for bearing with me!


	6. Interrupted Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Herc and Stacker have a morning to themselves.

It was morning and Hercules Hansen felt like he'd melted into the mattress and not yet fully re-solidified.  
When he opened his eyes, he could see butter-colored sunlight was falling across the foot of their bed in a slanting shaft, and in the connected bathroom he heard the toilet flush, followed immediately after by the sink running.  
A moment later Stacker was coming out of the bathroom, humming, bringing with him a warm soapy-scented wake of air.  
"Good morning, Mr. Pentecost," he said, grinning, and Herc smiled back and held out one arm.  
"Morning, Mr. Hansen," he mumbled. "Kids want to go anywhere?"  
Stacker laughed a little, the sound traveling in warm breaks over his mind. "They've gone already. We are alone..."  
The mattress dipped and the movement rippled ever so seductively, as Stacker sat down on the bed beside him.  
In a moment his lips were on Herc's cheek, his temple. Herc smiled, chuckling a little, half-asleep and content.  
He slid one arm around Stacker's neck, the better to keep him there, where his warm-clean-sunny smell was the strongest, where his lips were on Herc's skin and his breath--minty already--was on his cheek.  
It was the weekend. The weekend! He was perfectly happy, for once--it was warm, the damned neighbor dogs had calmed down...  
He didn't realize he'd begun to doze off again until he felt Stacker lift one of his hands off his chest.  
"We have the entire," Stacker kissed Herc's other hand, rolling his knuckles between his fingertips, Herc humming, pleased, "Morning," his lips, the bristly hairs of his moustache brushing Herc's wrist, "To ourselves."  
Herc was fighting the urge to just lie there beside Stacker and not move as various parts of his anatomy woke up faster than other parts.  
Stacker, however, was looking at him from where he was resting his head on his hand, smiling more with his eyes than his mouth.  
"You drive a hard bargain, Mr. Hansen," Herc said, and Stacker laughed again, dropped a warm-fuzzy kiss onto his navel.  
"Why, Mr. Pentecost. You drive quite a bit of something hard, yourself," he said, and Stacker wrapped his hand around Herc's cloth-covered erection and gently squeeze. Herc _did_ move, twitching, hard, groaning in warm half-lucid pleasure, rolling his hips up to meet Stacker's grip.  
"Want to wake up a bit more and fool around? Or shall I just fuck you into proper consciousness, and we can go from there?" Stacker murmured, against his ear rather than in it, and Herc's cock was cloth-strainingly hard in his underwear two heartbeats later.  
"Stack, you've always been more of a morning person," he said. "'M not properly awake for much of anything besides lying here."  
Stacker chuckled. "Lazybones. I suppose I can indulge you."  
Herc grinned, yawned, and stretched. "Just this once?"  
"Just this once." Stacker agreed.  
He sighed, pleased, and his eyes drifted shut again as he listened to Stacker puttering around, getting things ready.  
Herc rolled onto one side and kicked off his sleeping pants, fought with his boxers a moment until Stacker tutted at him, undid the button trapping his erection in the fly, and then pulled them the rest of the way off.  
"Herc..." Stacker purred, and he opened his eyes then, looked back at Stacker looking at him the way a man looks at a treasure chest, with thoughts running behind his eyes.  
He ran a hand down his stomach, palmed his own balls.  
Stacker made another noise, softer, lower, and Herc squeezed himself slightly when Stacker pulled his bottom lip into his mouth and it came back out wet and gleaming.  
He pulled Herc's hand away and leaned forward, closing one hand around the base, and Herc felt his breath before he felt his lips as Stacker kissed the head, kissed a wet path down the underside.  
There was a perfect moment when Stacker slid his lips around his cock, wet heat and pressure, and Stacker was canting his head at a perfect angle.  
He hummed softly, once, and Herc clenched all over, his toes sinking into the mattress.  
Orgasm shimmered at the edge of his vision, his skin itching for it, and he had to reach down and grab the hand Stacker had around his cock to stop him.  
"Ohh--ohh, Stack, wait, I'll come--" he said, his hand clenching and unclenching around Stacker's wrist.  
Stacker pulled off with a soft pop, chuckling.  
"Oh? Will you," he said, playing idly with the tip of his cock, rolling his foreskin back off the head.  
"How interesting," he said, his mouth inches away from Herc's cock, his breath enough that Herc twitched and almost whimpered.  
 _"Stacker,"_ he whined.  
Stacker laughed, and ran a hand up his stomach, across his chest, thumbing the hard peaks of his nipples. For a moment he idly carded Herc's chest hair between his fingertips, humming, pleased.  
Herc watched Stacker watching him, caught in a feedback-loop of pleasure, until Stacker looked him in the eyes and nodded at him.  
"Want to roll over?"  
"Yeah," Herc nodded, kicking free of the sheets, and flipped onto his stomach, wincing when his cock hit the sheets.  
"Careful," Stacker murmured.  
"Yeah," Herc said, again.  
Stacker's thighs bracketed his next, one of his hands falling on Herc's ass.  
Herc twitched again, grunting softly, and Stacker chuckled.  
"Thought you said you weren't properly awake," he said.  
Herc said nothing, only turned his head on the pillow and smirked back at Stacker.  
The other man poured lube into one palm, slicked his fingers.  
He muffled his groan into the pillow when Stacker pushed in the first time, his eyes falling shut. And for awhile he lay there while Stacker finger-fucked him, pleasure bristling in warm spikes up his spine.  
His skin tingled, his cock throbbing hard against the sheets, and he half-wanted to reach underneath himself to jerk himself off, but--  
"Ahh--" he managed, before clenching down, his hands fisted in the sheets, doing his damndest not to come.  
Stacker let his fingers slide out slow, the way he liked, and the breath Herc released came out sounded smothered. He relaxed a fraction.  
"With a condom or without?" Stacker murmured into his ear, and the polished accent was slipping back into Tottenham brogue. Herc wanted to kiss him until his lips stung.  
"Without," he said. "We can take a shower afterwards."  
And Stacker made a pleased rumble in his chest, pressed a kiss to his cheek, his shoulder.  
His pulse picked up the second he felt the mattress shift. Stacker leaned over him neatly, pressed the head of his cock to his asshole, and pushed smoothly in.  
Herc's response to being filled was a long, low groan that lasted until Stacker bottomed out, his hips flush against Herc's ass, and Herc felt completely, perfectly full.  
His cock was leaking a puddle onto the sheets. Stacker had him pinned, his weight across Herc's back, his breath slowly leveling out in Herc's ear.  
"Oh, that's lovely," Stacker murmured, brushing kisses against Herc's ear, the side of his face.  
"Mmm," Herc said, groping for Stacker's hand across the sheet.  
Stacker laced their fingers, sliding his other hand around and sliding his other hand around Herc's throat, warmth from his hand blooming across the skin there.  
"Tell me when you want me to move," Stacker whispered, and Herc nodded, drawing in a shuddering breath.  
"Okay. Okay, yeah, please, Stack--"  
Stacker started off slow, rocking their hips together, so slow that it was nothing but torturous little ripples of sensation.  
Herc held on for the ride, his fingers twisted tight around Stacker's, muffling his noises into a pillow until Stacker tugged it away.  
"I want to hear you," he said, "I love listening to you, you've no idea how much, _Hercules_ \--"  
"Stacker, _please_!"  
"I love you so much," Stacker murmured, and thrust into him harder.  
"I--Stack--I love--you just--oh--"  
Herc was making little truncated gasps, Stacker's hand so hot on his throat it burned, their sweat slicking his back and Stacker's front, red waves of pleasure surging up and down inside him with every thrust.  
Without thinking he began chanting a litany of "Oh, Stacker--please--yes--" that made his husband's thrusts stronger in intensity but not speed, until he was genuinely begging, his cock hard and twitching and his scalp and balls prickling with impending orgasm, and--  
And then Stacker was rolling them both over onto their sides, so when he came his semen made an arc out over the sheets, Stacker's hand still on his throat, the other around his stomach, and Stacker groaned softly in his ear. He pulled out slow, Herc shivering and whining softly in protest, but he felt Stacker come a minute later, a hot dribble on the inside of his thigh.  
"Oh," he managed.  
Stacker laughed, panting, and kissed the back of Herc's neck.  
He slid his arm under Herc's head and tucked himself in close behind him, sliding one of his thighs between Herc's comfortably.  
Herc, for his part, was content to lie there ragdoll-limp and let Stacker arrange him however he liked; the feeling that he'd melted had returned, better this time, his entire body feeling fuzzed-over with pleasure.  
"You're twitching still," Stacker said softly, his breath stirring Herc's hair.  
Herc laughed softly, yawning. "So're you." And then he groaned a little, looking over at the sticky mess they'd made.  
"Gonna have to do laundry."  
"I'll do it," Stacker said. "Once it becomes a pressing issue."  
An idea came to Herc. He opened his eyes and turned his head.  
"You said the kids are gone all day?"  
"Mm."  
"Huh."  
"I was thinking," Stacker said, gently trailing a hand down his stomach, skating it over Herc's navel, then back up again, to tuck his thumb into the slight crease between his pecs, "We could have a shower, get the laundry squared away, watch a bit of telly, and then," he paused, pressed a kiss to Herc's shoulder, "Do this again."  
Herc made a pleased noise, and wriggled loose to roll over and face him. He slung an arm over Stacker's shoulders and for a moment just stared over into his face, smiling, feeling giddy as a kid at university with his first lover. Stacker smiled back, his rare, flawless smiles, the kind that felt like the definition of affection itself.  
Herc kissed him, pressing himself closer, until they were flush, chest-to-chest down to their sweat-slicked bellies, and when he with drew he nodded.  
"That sounds like--" he was going to say it sounded like an excellent idea, until he was interrupted the combined sound of barking dogs, and someone revving the engine of a dirtbike.  
Stacker sighed and pursed his lips. He dipped his head, brushing forehead and nose with Herc, and muttered, "I suppose we'll have to skip the last part."  
Herc sighed, too. "Yeah. Maybe just turn the volume on the television all the way up. Again."  
The dirtbike engine actually got louder.  
They both rolled onto their backs, sighing.  
"Maybe we ought to get out of the house instead," Stacker suggested.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, they call each other by each other's last names because they are affectionate married dorks I LOVE THEM OKAY I WANT THEM TO BE HAPPY I WILL DO WHAT I WANT.


	7. Lazy Sunday

Raleigh checked his backpack again, swearing softly.  
"Yancy? Have you seen my little black sketchbook?"  
The house was quiet around him, and though he'd left Yancy in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in front of him, he doubted his brother was awake enough to actually respond.

He was right. He discovered this when he walked back into the kitchen and found Yancy squinting down at the cup like it was a handful of moon-rocks or a small, taxidermied woodland creature, instead of a cup of the only liquid available over the counter that was strong enough to wake him up.  
"Ray?" he asked, his voice hoarse. "Time is it?"  
"Uh. Six thirty?"

Yancy turned his head a fraction. Raleigh had to stifle a snort; his eyes were REALLY screwed shut, as if keeping them closed was keeping them from falling out.

"...On Sunday. Why are we awake?" Yancy managed next.  
"'Cause you told me to get you up when I got up. You said you had some important paperwork to take care of. So, I got you up."

He watched Yancy turn back towards the table. His eyes opened a tiny sliver.   
"This Tendo's good coffee?"   
"Yup. Made it special, the way you like, with extra sugar and only a little cream." Raleigh offered.

"Huh." Yancy opened his eyes the rest of the way, but continued to stare around himself as if he were in some weird Bizarro-world version of their house. 

Hesitantly, he reached out and wrapped his hands around the mug.  
Raleigh finally laughed. He clapped Yancy on both his shoulders and said, "Just drink your coffee, big bro. You look like you need it."

"I wouldn't if you weren't a morning sadist," Yancy said.  
Raleigh left the kitchen, laughing.

Another turn around their living room--which wasn't elaborately-furnished to begin with--yielded nothing. 

He was beginning to worry he'd lost it, and was backtracking through all his steps when he remembered--  
Chuck's face, his eyes wide as he looked at Tendo, before he rushed into the house. He remembered Mako leaning over him, her eyes intently studying the page. He remembered explaining the situation with Tendo and his long list of exes; he remembered they'd had to get back to work, and he'd lent it to her.

He sighed, relaxing. That was the last place he remembered it, and the first place it made sense to check.

With that in mind, he walked back into the kitchen and went to the fridge, where rows and rows of multi-colored sticky-notes were written all over with telephone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses: a complete catalogue of all Pacifica's regular customers. High-tech, their organization system was not. But it got the job done, and the Becket boys weren't fond of fixing things that weren't broke.

The Pentecost-Hansens' sticky-note was a yellow one with blue writing, the start date of the project boxed in in blue high-lighter. He reached for the phone on its wall-caddy before it occurred to him that they would probably still be sleeping--and also that he could just wait until Monday to ask for it back.

Yancy made a soft noise behind him, and when Raleigh turned around, he saw him stretching, his arms up over his head.  
That was always a good sign.

"Want some breakfast? I think we still have eggs," he offered.  
"No way, man. I'm not _even_ awake enough to eat yet," Yancy mumbled.  
Raleigh snorted again. "Okay, bro. Just don't try to cook anything 'til that coffee kicks in. Okay?"

Yancy looked over his shoulder at him and smirked, shaking his head. He turned back to the paper-swathed table and mumbled vaguely pleasant words at Raleigh, while he poured himself orange juice in a huge glass--the one with only one nick in the rim--and then patted him on the shoulder again as he strode back into the living room.

They had two couches they'd rescued from thrift shops. The bigger one was brown, orange, and gray plaid, and the smaller one was maroon-ish burgundy, with a weird geometric design cut into the pile of the material. 

Their coffee table that was a gift from the Kaidonovskies--it was black and angular and modern-looking, and had shelves underneath it where they stashed some of their movies. And they had their favorite appliance--next to, of course, the coffee machine--a gigantic, ancient big-screen TV. It was so big there was no fitting it into any hutch or armoire, so big it literally took up half the wall they'd pushed it against, but mercifully not too old to actually use. They'd gotten it off Craigslist for $150, on a stroke of Raleigh's colossal good luck.

Raleigh set his orange juice down on the table and flopped down onto the plaid couch, across from the TV. He grabbed the remote, turned the TV on, and fiddled with the remove until the DVD player obeyed, starting up with a venomous hiss. 

(They'd dropped it ONCE. Ever since, it acted like the world's most fickle performance-artist, responding to coddling sometimes and blunt-force-trauma at others, but never, ever functioning properly again.)

The last DVD in was one of the seasons of Thundercats, which he didn't remember putting in, but which he was cool with. While the opening credits were rolling, he went back to his room to grab one of his big sketchbooks and a handful of pencils.

He spent the morning on the couch, doodling, while Yancy shuffled papers, then groaned (Raleigh stuck his head around the partition and looked to see the older man stretching) and then finally shuffled his feet, before he came wandering into the living room, fiddling with the ties on his gray robe.

"Mornin'! Welcome to the land of the living," Raleigh said, and grinned when Yancy grumbled a little.  
"Yeah, yeah. What do you want for breakfast? I'm feelin' like waffles and eggs."

So they turned up the volume on the TV and wandered into the kitchen, where they worked in tandem to make a huge pile of waffles, and an equally grand mound of scrambled eggs.

Raleigh encountered a minor setback while digging through their fridge.  
"Aww, damn. Are we seriously out of Hershey's?"   
Yancy looked over at him from the waffle iron he was watching, and shrugged. "If it's not in the fridge, it's not in the house."

Raleigh could do a really spot-on impersonation of a disappointed nine-year-old, when the time called for it.

Yancy's only response was to laugh. "We should still have some maple syrup--the good stuff Tendo brought back from the last time he went to San Francisco."  
"Oh, yeah! Awesome!"

Their kitchen table almost never saw plates. They sat in the living room and ate breakfast like a pair of teenagers--Raleigh balanced his plate on his lap as he sat cross-legged on the couch, and Yancy set his on the table and hunched over it like a baggy-eyed gargoyle.

"God, remember when this show was the coolest thing ever?" Yancy mumbled, muffling a giggle, when Lion-O delivered a spectacularly corny line.  
"Yup," Raleigh said, and grinned back at him.

And when Mumm-Ra's response was even more over-the-top and hokey, they both shared a look and then burst into howls of laughter.

Raleigh was just glad that, when Yancy was laughing, he didn't look so _tired_. And he himself didn't feel so tired, either.  
(On mornings like that, it was easy to start to relax. It was easy, and things just felt _better_.)

~

Chuck sighed again, and Mako patted his arm gently.   
They sat on a park bench in the shade of three big oak trees, looking across the grassy bowl of the park, sloping down gently towards the playground where there were a few little kids and their families.

People were throwing Frisbees and sticks for their dogs; an old woman with a camera was snapping pictures of some finches fighting over something on the ground.

Over their heads, the sky was perfect California blue, wispy clouds trailing decoratively over the horizon towards the east. It was an afternoon fit for a postcard.

At least, it looked that way. Chuck still felt like he'd been repeatedly kicked in the chest.

The bench where they were sitting was in a recessed area, partially screened by a tall hedge on one side, and a big swath of ivy growing on the wall to their other. And the whole park stretched out in front of them--giving them a lovely view of all the other happy people.

Normally, Chuck would have slathered on some sunscreen and gone and tossed tennis balls around for Max to fetch. Or he and Mako would have gone for a jog, or gone to the handball courts. She'd have thrashed him--because she always did--but it would have been fun.

Better than sitting and letting his brain's gears run themselves.

"Should've brought Max. He'd've liked some fresh air." Chuck said.  
Mako shrugged. "He would have been trying to run around. He might have hurt himself. Besides, you don't need your safety-blanket dog all the time, do you?"

He looked at her, his face pinched. "He's not my safety blanket! I'm just...worried about him."  
Mako made an amused noise and he elbowed her lightly in the side. She elbowed him right back, smirking.  
"Well, _I'm_ worried about _you_."

He sighed, and started to mumble some lie about how he was fine, but one look at her face and he knew she'd be able to see right through it. 

Instead of talking, he shifted in his seat and crossed his arms.   
Mako patted his arm again, but didn't push him.

There was the sound of several dogs coming up the footpath--claws clicking on the concrete, panting, and in a moment the source of the sound came around the bend.

They were a pair of doctors and about half a dozen dogs.  
"Newton, I _told_ you, you mustn't let them _run_ like that, especially not in areas of reduced visibility! You said yourself, this is an area with a lot of wildlife--"

"Yeah, I know-- _I KNOW_! But I gotta give the little guys some leg-room, let 'em stretch every now and then, don't I? I just--heyyyy it's Chuck n' Mako!" And Newt stopped a bit short of them, carefully maneuvering his handfuls of leashes into one hand.  
Chuck grinned at the sight of them.

Newt stood hip-deep amongst a small pack of dogs of varying breeds, all panting contentedly. He was wearing a pair of the tiniest running shorts Chuck had ever seen, accompanied by an equally-tight white t-shirt and white sweat-bands around his wrists and forehead. The shorts were day-glo green, rivalled in brightness only by the day-glo yellow socks he had on. Technicolor tattoos of mythical beasts crawled up and down his arms, but his legs were bare, save for a curl of blue tentacle peeking up from the hem of one of his socks.

Behind him, Dr. Gottlieb coasted to a halt on an antique-looking ten-speed. He was wearing a pair of knickerbockers, long argyle socks, Oxfords, and a sweater vest; beige never looked so good. 

"Hello, Newt and Dr. Gottlieb," Mako said. She managed to maintain both eye contact and a poker face, which Chuck did not.

"Hey, Doc Geiszler." He nodded at him, grinning, and then spoke over his shoulder to Dr. Gottlieb, who appeared to be counting the dogs.

Chuck asked, "Did you let him dress himself again, Doc Gottlieb?"  
"...Good afternoon, Mako. Yes, Charles, I did. It is, after all, the weekend. I see no harm in indulging his...er, interesting fashion choices, as long as he is off-duty and sufficiently far from the clinic to avoid being seen by any of his patients' owners." Dr. Gottlieb said. 

He rolled his eyes when Newt turned around and--doubtlessly--made a face at him.

"You look like a newsboy from the twenties," Chuck continued.  
Dr. Gottlieb preened, tugging at the hem of the sweater-vest proudly.  
"Don't I? I thought at least one of us ought to look put-together. Especially if the other wants to dress like--"

"Hey, hey! I'm walking dogs, I wanna be visible! Unlike you, Doctor ZhiBlahgo, blending in with the dead foliage wherever you go. At least I don't look like I'm wearing a _costume_!"  
"Oh, yes, I'm certain you fit _right_ in, dressed like a walking traffic hazard signal--"  
"Even _Chuck_ said you look like you're wearing a costume!"  
"--he said no such thing, and you needn't be petulant just because you made poor fashion choices."

Newton was mocking him, flapping his jaw open and closed like a hand puppet, aping Hermann's gestures back at him.

Mako's ironclad politeness wavered. She snickered into one curled hand, and did not quite manage to disguise it as a cough.  
Chuck laughed in spite of himself.

"Oh, honestly, Newton," Hermann said. "At least--come here, at least let me straighten your clothes out; your shirt is dreadfully wrinkled, and there are leaves caught in your hair. Why _are_ you wearing that headband, it's doing nothing whatsoever."

Chuck watched them bicker it out, watching the way Dr. Gottlieb kicked his bike a bit closer and fussed with Newt's headband--Newt didn't even slap his hands away, just made a face and shook his head vigorously afterwards, skewing his hair all over again.

And something occurred to him. They were _happy_. Not saccharine-movie-happy, not bored-and-settling happy, but legitimately _happy_. 

Dr. Gottlieb was happy fussing over Newt, and Newt was happy letting him hover around him, and in turn teasing the hell out of Dr. Gottlieb. They were happy talking about science and math whatever other stuff that doctors talked about together; they were probably happy as they went home and washed the dishes and debated what movie to watch before bed.

Mako laughed beside him as one of the dogs decided they saw something worth barking at, and the entire pack started.

When he looked, he saw it was a flimsy model plane with a noisy engine, flying by just overhead. 

While the dogs began losing their collective doggy shits over the plane, Newt kept turning around and around, trying not to get horribly tied up in the leashes, and mostly failing. 

Mako stood up and helped untangle him.  
"Here...before you trip and fall and crush one of the smaller ones," she laughed.

"Hah, yeah, let me _not_. Mrs. Chesterfield--lady who owns Lexie, that little Yorkie, would probably break my legs. --Lexie! Hi, Lexie!"   
Lexie picked one paw up off the ground and looked up at him like he had a second head.

"Poor thing's really, ah, well, the polite term is 'overbred', but seriously, I'm willing to bet she's her own cousin or something. Forgets how to go up and down stairs and stuff. Super fucked-up, but you can't say that to an owner who paid, what, eighteen hundred? For a puppy?" 

Mako shook her head. "I don't know why anyone would pay that much for a dog...and don't teacup dogs usually end up developing all kinds of health problems?"  
"Yeeeaaah..." 

While they talked--or tried to, because the dogs were getting increasingly agitated--Dr. Gottlieb was surreptitiously straightening Newt's shirt while he talked to Mako, until--

"Holy cheese, Hermy, can you let a guy's clothes get a _little_ lived-in? Maybe I don't wanna look like a mannequin, okay?"

Hermann--Dr. Gottlieb--snorted softly. "Of course, dear boy. You'd rather look like you were just trampled by a pack of wild dogs..."  
"Maybe I _like_ that look!"

Hermann added, gently, "Your underwear was showing. And there are still leaves in your hair."

Chuck watched, with a growing feeling of emptiness spreading through his chest. Mako finally helped Newt get disentangled from the web of leashes, and was handing some of them back to him.

"We really ought to get going," Dr. Gottlieb said, eyeing the plane. "Rather tacky little model, that. Sounds as though the engine isn't properly lubricated, or somesuch--"

"--Yeah-- _FUCK_ , no, Fritz, _SIT_ \--good dog--yeah, guys, we, uh, heh," Newt said, stepping over _another_ loop of leash, "It was nice seeing you! Oh, and Chuck, don't forget to bring Max around on the seventeenth and we'll get his stitches out. Bye, guys!"

And with some weird contortion, he managed to slip all the leashes into the crook of one arm so that he could wave goodbye. 

Chuck watched them go, the emptiness spreading, until it occurred to him that it was _loneliness_.   
And that realization came like another kick in the chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone told me that the paragraph formatting was too hard to read, so I'm trying something a little different. Does this look better?
> 
> (ps. thanks, cammeh!)


	8. Back to the Grind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The neighbors aren't getting any nicer.

The weekend flew past. Mako offered for him to tag along when she went out two more times, and he declined both times. The incident with the doctors at the park was still fresh in his mind, and he kept thinking about himself in their position--walking Max in the park, down the footpath.

Except there was nothing but a man-shaped blur where his partner would have been. He couldn't even come up with an image of Tendo to put there, without seeing his face, forehead creased in regret, as he shook his head and told him no. 

Chuck spent his time mostly on his bed. He had to force himself downstairs when Stacker announced meals, and ate in a kind of numb fog, mentally berating himself for being so stereotypically lovesick the entire time.

Herc and Stacker gave him space, although whenever he was out of his room, Stacker was always appearing from somewhere, greeting with a pat on the back or a squeeze on the shoulder. He didn't _say_ anything, though, which was the most maddening part--but then, Chuck knew, he was probably just waiting for Chuck to ask him for advice.

As if he even knew how.

Mako was downstairs tearing the living room apart looking for something when he came downstairs on Monday morning.  
"Have you seen a small black book with no title on it?" she asked him, before he could talk.

He nodded. Currently, it was in his room, balanced on top of his stack of comics. He'd read and re-read it twice already and still wondered where she'd gotten it.  
"Oh, thank goodness! Where is it?"

"I have it. Why?"  
"Because it's Raleigh's, and I need to give it back." She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head. "Why do _you_ have it?"

Inwardly, he froze, and had a weird, abrupt realization that he'd probably been poking around in the other man's, like, scrapbook. 

Which made him feel strange, because the person who'd written the book had a dry, half-not-funny wit and liked drawing trees and dogs. They wrote a lot of stuff about leaving the people you love behind, and what it meant to lose a place that a lot of memories were attached to. They sketched lots of different houses and buildings in lots of different places, usually in black and white, except for the cabin at the beginning, the colors rubbed into the page as pale as memories.

The writer of the book had very conspicuously made barely any mention at all of a family, and hadn't put any other identifying features in, either. It was almost like the book was a meditation journal, a place they only wrote or drew calming things. He'd quite liked that about it.

Suddenly he felt guilty, as if he'd stolen the other man's journal and read it.

Instead of saying any of this to Mako--because he was terrible at explaining his feelings in real-time--he shrugged, and went to the fridge. "Found it lying around."

Mako made an annoyed noise. "Did you mangle it the way you do all your books?"

With one hand on the milk carton, he turned and made a face at her.  
"No! It's just...there. I've been looking through it."

She sighed and crossed her arms. "Well--okay, can you give it back to me?"  
He hummed a little, unscrewed the lid on the milk, and took a gulp. The disgusted look on her face made him feel just a bit better. He snickered, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. 

And then he hesitated a moment, and finally said, "Nah. I'll give it back to him myself." 

~

That was the plan, anyway. But when Raleigh and Tendo showed up that afternoon, the just-kicked-in-the-chest feeling came back, and he had to restrict himself to slinking around near them, hiding in the margin of the house's shadow. He held Max's leash and pretended to be watching the dog whenever they glanced at him.

Eventually, though, he couldn't think of an excuse to be hanging around with them only a handful of yards away; he took Max over around to the shady side of the house, where there was more broken pottery stacked against the white plaster foundation. Here, there was a stack of plastic pallets of potting soil, faint orange-red dust in the creases on the plastic. The sandy dirt was cool from being in the shade all day, cool enough that he could feel it through the soles of the battered Vans he was wearing.

He sighed softly and sat down on top of the stack of potting soil, toed off his shoes, and splayed his bare feet.

Max wandered around his feet, snuffling at the ground, and stiffened suddenly when there was the metallic rasping noise of a gate opening somewhere.

A low growl started up in the dog's throat. He barked twice.  
"Hey," Chuck said.   
Max gave him an apologetic look. 

"That's better. Won't do you any good to bark yourself hoarse over those assholes over there, will it? Besides, in a bit, Tendo n' his friend will have the wall done, and we'll be through with them forever." He ruffled the rolls on Max's neck gently. 

Max waggled his tail briefly, but still stared in the direction of the other house.  
He chuckled softly, watching Max's nose and ears twitch intently as the dog stared at apparently nothing.

"You wanna go have round two, don't ya? Can't let ya, mate. I know, I know, you could've taken 'em all in a fair fight, but they don't fight fair. They'd've eaten you alive. Who'd guard the house, then?"  
Max looked at him and sighed. He clambered up onto the pallet beside Chuck, and he watched the dog curl up on the cool plastic before dropping his jowly head onto his forelegs with a soft huff.

"Yeah. Pity they weren't a nicer lot, then we wouldn't have to drive twenty minutes just to get you to your friends."  
Max was a very taciturn dog, and an excellent listener. He was watching Chuck, his ears shifting now and again. Sometimes his tail would twitch, when Chuck sounded especially plaintinve.

And right now he felt absolutely pathetic. He couldn't even go inside and whine to Mako; she had homework, after all, and he didn't want to be a complete pain.  
He shifted slightly and winced. The little black sketchbook--which was in one of the pockets of the khaki cargo shorts he was wearing--was digging into his thigh.

He pulled it out of his pocket, grimacing. It was still intact, which was no small feat on his part, and he knew all he had to do was be an adult and walk it over to Raleigh. Hand it to him. Look him in the face and explain that he'd read it, thank him, and then take the big plunge and apologize. 

It'd be like ripping off a bandage. You had to do it all at once, or else it would hurt terribly for way longer than it needed to.

The problem was how he could even go about starting that conversation.  
He could just...walk up, blurt out an apology, throw the sketchbook at him, and run the fuck away before Raleigh could ask any questions--such as "Why did you have this?" and "What the fuck is your problem?"

And before he got a chance to even open his mouth to Tendo. Because really, a person could only handle so much embarrassment in one day.  
He hesitated a moment before speaking next.

"How d'you say 'I'm sorry' in dog-speak? Bet it's easier than English. Are there dialects I should know? Maybe Yank dogs don't understand Aussie. What d'you think?"  
Max just looked at him. He was reading way too much into this, though, because Max seemed to look a little bemused. Not quite annoyed.

Dear god, he thought, soon even his own dog was going to be giving him the Pentecost Family Stern Look, and then who would he turn to for sympathy?  
Max's ears twitched a few times. He stood up, suddenly, stepped down, and walked around the corner.

"Hey," Chuck said, sounding entirely too forlorn, "Where are you going?"  
He stood up a moment later, and followed the dog.  
And wished he hadn't.

Max had sat down beside Raleigh--so close he was almost on one of the man's booted feet, actually--and Raleigh was leaning over him, rubbing his head.

"...should you be outside with your stitches, buddy?" Chuck heard him ask.  
Raleigh looked up when he heard Chuck step around the corner of the house.  
For one second they were both completely still, their eyes locked, and it wasn't mocking or challenging or...anything.  
Chuck rather wanted to shrivel up in embarrassment and die.

Raleigh offered a small, hesitant smile, which Chuck failed spectacularly at responding to. Mainly due to the fact that his brain was rolling over itself in embarrassment and he was too frozen to move.

Max looked between them, stood back up, and waddled back over to Chuck. He looked up at him expectantly.

Chuck looked at Max, stupidly, then back at Raleigh, then back at Max.  
He was about to open his mouth to talk to Raleigh when he heard Tendo's voice, muffled with distance.  
"Hey, Rals, come on! We've still gotta get back and see if the rest of the bricks have come in yet..."

"Yeah, I'm coming," Raleigh said.  
And he gave Chuck another unreadable look--or, at least, a look that didn't say Let's Fight--so Chuck wasn't familiar with it, before he walked away.

Chuck's wits only returned when Raleigh had crossed behind the house's other corner, after he heard the gate latch open and close.  
"Oh my god," Chuck muttered.  
Max grunted softly beside him.

"I think he saw me talking to you. Great. That's just...great."  
He realized belatedly that he'd been holding Raleigh's sketchbook the entire time.

~

The first bang woke him up.   
Max was trying to burrow into his side, whimpering in confused fear. 

"Whatsamatter, huh, Maxie? You hear that, too?" Chuck mumbled. He sat up and spent a moment swearing under his breath while groping in the dark for the lamp.

The green LED display on his bedside clock said it was 2:30, which would explain why he felt like his head was full of cotton and his body was made of lead.

There was another bang and a strange crackling noise. Max began barking--at the walls, at the ceiling--and climbed into Chuck's lap, whining and wriggling. Chuck lifted the dog up--groaning a little, because Max was not a small dog--he kicked his legs out of the sheets and stood up unsteadily. When he tried to put him down, Max yapped like a hurt puppy, so Chuck sighed and carried his armload of squirming, agitated dog downstairs.

Herc and Stacker were already downstairs, peeping out through a slat in the back door blinds like a pair of old fogeys hiding from ding-dong-ditchers. He cleared his throat and rasped, "The fuck was that noise?"

"The neighbors," Stacker said, "are throwing a party."  
"Now?" Chuck muttered, "What the hell for? Are they so fucking drunk now, they're celebrating odd hours of the night?"

Stacker did the rumbling thing, and Chuck's skin felt too tight--he was irritated and jumpy and really needed sleep.

"Well, are one of you gonna go over there, or do I have to?" he demanded.  
Herc turned around and pinned him to the spot with a look--or tried to, because the last time he'd taken Herc seriously had been about ten years ago--and Chuck scoffed. 

"Oh, what, we're s'posed to just let them--" another bang, and more barking from Max "--what the _fuck_ is that noise?"

Mako came downstairs next, hair completely fucked up and with her pajama shorts on inside-out. She said one thing.   
"They have fireworks." 

"Okay, great, so we call the fucking _police_ , because you guys heard the real-estate woman, this is a fire hazard zone, so unless you want to burn in your beds--"

"For pity's sake, Chuck, we called the police half an hour ago!" Stacker snapped.  
Chuck actually shut up, embarrassed. 

"So...are they not coming?" he mumbled.  
Mako gave him a dirty look.

He looked down at Max and decided not to say anything else.

The last time the police had come to speak to them, they'd taken one look at the lot of them, and their entire attitude had gone from businesslike police officers to sneering assholes.  
Chuck was used to it. He didn't walk around with a chip on his shoulder for nothing.

He didn't know how he could have made the mistake of seriously believing that America--even in sunny, Pride-parade-having California--that some people were anything other than bigoted, homophobic pieces of shit.

He remembered the way the two cops kept glancing at one another, how one of them kept pretending to wipe his nose to hide his ugly grin. He remembered seething with rage, his hands fisted in his armpits, as he listened to the smug bastards ask Stacker to clarify again--how many dogs were there? And, really, they were calling the police about dogs? And remembering the way the cop had talked down to Stacker, as if he was some thick-headed moron, and explained how offenses worked.

Explained! Stacker had very politely explained that he knew laws and protocol and was a former RAF pilot and officer and no, it wasn't just the coyotes. Chuck was practically vibrating with fury.

Mako had kept her hands at her sides, but her fingertips were sunk into the meat of her legs, her back ramrod straight. She'd had a look on her face that would have made Chuck cut and run.

The cops had taken a report--exhanging smirking looks the entire time--and left after that.  
He should have known, then, that they wouldn't be coming back.

Chuck sighed. "Right. I've had enough. I'm going over there--"  
He was met with a chorus of "No!" from everyone else in the room.

"You will not go instigate a conflict," Stacker said. "You will _not_ go provoke them. We already know what kind of people we're dealing with; we don't need them to put you in the hospital to prove a point."

As if to punctuate that, the music somehow became louder--someone must have opened a door--and voices so loud they could hear them clearly spilled out.  
Mako was the one who began turning on lights.

"There's no point in pretending we are asleep," she said. "Since they clearly don't care either way."  
And even when the police finally _did_ show up--thirty minutes later, after forty minutes of all four of them sitting in the living room like they were holding some kind of fucking nighttime fear-vigil--the house still took two hours to empty out, the sound of tires on the dirt road outside mixing with the sounds of shattering glass. They could hear the backchatter from the police cars' loudspeakers as the officers spoke, repeating orders for the partiers to disperse.

Chuck fell into bed face-first and didn't even move to cover himself; he had weird dreams about gray fields where there were the beached, burnt-out wrecks of cars, and no matter how far he walked, he could not escape it.

He woke up with the sunlight warming his back, and someone knocking on his door.  
"Yeah," he mumbled, with his face still mashed into his comforter. "Come in!"

Stacker opened the door and stepped inside, radiating sympathy and fatherly concern down at him.

Chuck sat up in bed, wiping sleep out of his eyes, stretching, and generally feeling like he'd spent the entire night sleeping on a block of wood with a bag of rocks for a pillow.  
"We thought...after last night, we could all do with a nice day someplace else. We're going out for breakfast, and then groceries. Would you like to come?"

He sat up, rubbing his eyes, his face. Max was sound-asleep on his right side, the sheets rumpled into a nest around him.

He thought of staying home, of reading comics or playing video games or _anything_ , really, to kill time.  
Except he knew perfectly well that he'd only spend the entire time moping.

He held his breath a moment, then looked back up at Stacker.  
"Yeah," he said, "I'll go. Should we leave Max with Newt and Doc Gottlieb?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, this was stuck in revision hell. I had two separate plots to choose from, and since I'm terribly indecisive, I'm just trying to fuse the two. Sorry for the delay, and, as always, thanks for reading!


	9. Open Mouth, Insert Foot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things speed merrily along.  
> Stacker gives good (if late) advice; Chuck tries to avoid the Hansen Family Feelings Avoidance pitfall, and mostly fails. Which of the Kaidonovskies is Alexis, and which is Sasha?  
> All this and more in this latest installment of this shambling out-of-control AU that has consumed my life!

It was morning, and Raleigh was standing on the stoop of his house, backpack slouched against one of his legs. 

The sky was ultramarine blue washed with gold, the sun seeming to ride the crest of the mountains, where the low clouds crouched over the black-brown mountains in a haze. They were a paler blue-white towards the foothills, and streaked with white-gold up nearer the mountains' peaks, where the sun was burning down through them, a crescent of pure light.

He sighed again, wishing he could take his camera with him. The day had just started and was already shaping out to be beautiful.

Behind him, the door opened, and Yancy leaned out.  
"Is Tendo not here yet?"  
"Nope," he said. He shifted on his feet.  
"Maybe you should come back inside," Yancy suggested.  
"Yeah..."

They went back into the kitchen, and he spent five minutes watching and listening to Yancy call around, ordering concrete mix and plastic mesh from a supplier who seemed hellbent on screaming into the receiver--they were loud enough that Raleigh could HEAR them, but barely understand a word they said.

Yancy finished the call, wincing, and then grinned when Raleigh shook his head. But before he could put the phone back onto the cradle, it rang again.  
"Huh? What--"  
"Who is it?"

"It's Tendo!" Yancy said. He pressed the 'on' button, then raised it back to his ear.  
"Oh, hey--What? Yeah, he's right here. Wait, wait, let me just put you on speaker, okay?"

Tendo's voice came through the phone's speaker, high and distorted. "--eah--hey, Yancy, could you--call the triplets and the Kaidonovskys? There's been a pretty awful emergency at the Pentecost-Hansen place. Their trees--" he was interrupted by road noise, "--pieces on the floor, everywhere. We really need to get a move on with the wall."  
"What?"

Tendo sighed, the sound rattling and loud. "We'll talk when I get there. Call everyone and reschedule their normal routes. We've gotta take care of this now." 

 

The Weis came over first, Jin and Hu sweaty and aggravated--apparently the emergency call had drastically shortened their usual morning basketball game. Cheung mostly looked worried.  
When they were all piled into the kitchen, Tendo started to explain.

"All right. I got a call from Stacker and Herc, and lemme tellya," he raised his eyebrows and shook his head, "They are NOT happy. We've all gotta go over there and finish that wall ASAP. The neighbors are getting worse."

 

~

 

"And are you sure the trees are actually on your side of the property?" the cop was asking.  
"Yes. Yes, we are. Look, we've got all the necessary paperwork to prove that the trees are ours, and this is not the first time we've had to complain about the neighbors damaging them." Stacker finished talking, his eyes flashing. 

Raleigh didn't know how he was so calm, honestly. If he'd been in the older man's situation, he'd have been fighting mad. Stacker, however, kept his calm, though now and again he'd glance back at Herc with something like despairing frustration on his face.

Behind them were the ruins of their beautiful pine trees. 

Someone had messily ripped off all the lower limbs on two of the shorter ones. The bark on the taller one was pitted and scarred, and looked like someone had gone at it with the clawed part of a hammer or a crowbar. Crushed branches and fallen needles littered the torn-up ground everywhere. 

"Ah huh," he heard the cop say. When Raleigh looked back at him, he was jotting something down on his pad.

He looked bored, as if he'd rather be anywhere than where he was, and suddenly it occurred to Raleigh how the rest of the world probably saw the Pentecost-Hansens. 

He felt a pang of sadness for them, felt his envy of them turn bittersweet. His guts were a hard knot of nerves and he couldn't have said why, if anyone had noticed to ask. 

Tendo and Herc were talking about the wall, about speeding up building.  
Raleigh stood with the Weis and the Kaidonovskys, looking at the half-destroyed trees, the kicked-up dirt.  
No one seemed to want to say anything. 

There was a second cop, standing with his hands on his hips, looking between Stacker and the tree, with a not-quite-impassive face. Now and again he could hear chatter from one of the officers' radios, which they had not bothered to turn down.

He turned back to look at Stacker and the first cop when he heard Chuck's voice, loud over Stacker's.  
"Did we get a fucking PERMIT? Are you serious? Is he SERIOUS? It's OUR YARD! Their house is thirty fucking feet away, are you KIDDING--"

Herc had to bodily haul Chuck away from the policeman, and spent a few minutes with a visegrip on Chuck's shoulder, muttering low and quick to Chuck. Whose face looked like a thundercloud; he didn't look away from the cop for a second.

After a moment, though, the rage on his face turned into shock. He looked at Herc, eyes wide, and started to say something else.  
Herc cut him off with a shake of his head. 

Finally, after an eternity of watching the police officer scratch things down on his pad, he tore off a slip of paper and handed it to Stacker. Something about case numbers floated over to Raleigh.

They all watched the policemen leave--Chuck more closely than anyone else--and Raleigh turned to see Herc step up beside Stacker and put a hand on the small of his back.

They spoke to each other, too softly and quietly for him to hear.  
Herc started rubbing his back, and Raleigh turned right as he tipped his headup to give Stacker a kiss on the cheek.

Tendo and Mako came out of the house a moment later.  
"I just got off the phone with Yancy," Tendo said. Then, tipping his chin in Herc and Stacker's direction, "How'd it go with the cops?"

"Well, the guy taking the report seemed really unimpressed," Raleigh said. "Though, to be honest, I don't see how. There's no way any of that damage was naturally-caused."  
Tendo shrugged and made an annoyed noise.  
Mako mostly looked at the damaged trees, her face sad and open.

Herc and Stacker came over to them a moment later, Stacker looking weary and Herc looking both defeated and resigned.

"Well, everyone," Herc said. "We're going to need to know how much faster you can complete this wall."  
"We can double your hourly pay," Stacker added, his voice low and rough.

"That, uh, won't be necessary," Raleigh said. "Since we'll all be working here--"  
"Time-and-a-half, then," Stacker said, more firmly, and Raleigh closed his mouth mid-sentence.  
"Yes, sir. Me'n Tendo will talk it over and get back to you."

A five-minute phone call was all they needed to get the okay from Yancy, who decided to call around to all the people whose yards they normally did and apologize for the delay.  
So all of them fell to it. 

Tendo broke up and carried away the tree branches while the Weis, Raleigh, and the Kaidonovskys dug the trench, carried bricks, and poured cement. 

After awhile, Chuck suddenly materialized beside Raleigh, looking anxious.  
Aleksis took one look at him, beckoned him closer, and handed him a brick. He laughed--half-awkward, half-self-consciously, and walked over to where Sasha was smoothing cement.

He gestured with the brick; Sasha grinned and tapped the cement where the brick needed to go.  
That was how Chuck started helping them. Instead of helping out with one or two bricks, however, he kept on for almost half an hour, edging closer to where Raleigh and the Cheung were working softball-sized rocks out of the soil to clear a ditch for the wall.  
Chuck set a final brick on the wall and then straightened, sighing. 

Raleigh could feel the other man's eyes on his back, on the side of his face, and when he looked over at him, Chuck didn't look away fast enough for his staring not to be obvious.  
He still didn't _say_ anything, though.

"You know, your dads are kinda paying _us_ to do this," Raleigh said, finally, because the silence was literally starting to make his skin itch.

Chuck hesitated a moment, his eyes flicking from Raleigh back to the pile of bricks beside, and he shifted his shoulders and shrugged.  
"Yeah, I know." he said.  
"So you don't have to work as hard as the rest of us. Or at all, really..." he trailed off.

Usually when people who hired them tried to help, things ended up bungled horribly. But Chuck actually listened to their directions, didn't act like he knew more than they did, and never talked back.

He watched Chuck fiddle absently with a reddish-brown rock, staring into the dirt and hold it loosely with one hand. Raleigh raised his eyebrows slightly, waiting for Chuck to say something.  
"I was--" he began.

"Raleigh! Could you help us with this?" Aleksis called.  
"Yeah!" he stood and took a half-step towards the Kaidonovskies, then turned to look back at Chuck, who looked like he'd swallowed something bad.  
"Sorry," he said.  
He couldn't place why he felt strange, beyond thinking about how weird Chuck was acting.

~

Chuck watched Raleigh go, feeling stupider with every step the other man took.  
It shouldn't be that hard, he thought, to tell someone two things.

'Hey, so like,' he could say, the way Americans--particularly Californians--seemed to use the word for everything--'I wanted to apologize for the shit I was talking earlier. Also, I have your sketchbook. Here it is.'

And instead he'd kept sneaking covert looks at him, trying to find a way to say the things so that he didn't sound like a surly schoolboy with a crush.

An image of Mako flitted into his mind--her arms crossed over her chest, with the Pentecost Family Stern Look on it. She would have said something to the effect of, 'You're making this a lot harder than it is, and you know it!'  
He groaned softly and kicked a rock.

It caused a minor landslide of sandy dirt back into the ditch--and earned him a dirty look from the three Chinese triplets, whose names he was too nervous to even ask again, for fear of mixing them up and offending someone _else_ \--and he groaned softly.  
"Anyone got a shovel?" he asked.

~

When he finished helping the Kaidonovskies, Raleigh went back to the section of wall where the Weis were working.  
"Where'd Chuck go?" he asked.

Jin muttered something--Hu laughed--and Cheung finally said, "He almost wrecked a section of the ditch. We sent him to get a shovel so he can help us with it."  
"Oh," Raleigh said.

A conspiratorial look passed between the Weis. They looked back at him, and Jin smirked.  
Raleigh was quick enough to catch it, though. "Did I miss something?"  
"No," Jin said, too quickly.

His look went from conniving to amused a moment later, when someone cleared their throat behind him.  
Raleigh turned and saw Stacker standing there, a pair of gray yard gloves in one hand.

"I saw Chuck out helping and thought I'd come by and do damage control," he said.

Raleigh laughed a little. "Well, actually, he wasn't doing too bad. Might need a bit more in the way of conversation skills before we can hire him at Pacifica, though. We're all about keeping communications open."

Stacker smiled a little, nodding. "I see. Communication is most definitely not Chuck's strong suit."  
Then, after looking around at the wall for a moment, Stacker continued, "You enjoy your work."  
Raleigh watched him slip on the pair of gray yard gloves and tighten the velcro wrist-straps.  
"Well, uh. Yes. Sir." He said, and wanted to kick himself.

Stacker only looked amused. Raleigh was beginning to wonder if it wasn't a sign of some sort--Mr. Pentecost smiles at me, therefore something strange is _definitely_ about to happen.

"No need for formalities. We're neither of us military men anymore, are we?" he asked.  
Raleigh almost dropped the brick he was holding.  
"Uh, sir? You were...?"

"It's all rather far behind me now," Stacker said, offhandedly. "But I was, for a while, a pilot in the RAF. And then I was an officer." He was shielding his eyes from the sun with one hand, looking up at the house, his other hand on his hip. A moment later, still speaking casually, he added, "And now I'm here, laying bricks."

Raleigh's mouth was dry. He looked at the older man, his mouth open, and couldn't think of a single thing to say.

Stacker continued, in the same casual, conversational tones, "I've wanted a house like this my entire life. Now I have it," he said, grunting slightly as he turned and knelt, lifting the brick from Raleigh's hands easily, "And despite its needing quite a bit of work, I rather like it."

He took a step towards the wall, and then looked back at Raleigh, one eyebrow raised. "Do you want it here?"  
Raleigh smiled without meaning to. "S'your wall, sir."

"Oh, well, then, by all means, let me just build it willy-nilly if I feel like it. I've no experience whatsoever with yard work; do you know, Hercules and I got into a serious argument about hiring permanent help."  
"Herc's real name is Hercules?" Raleigh blurted. 

He was getting really good at running his mouth before his brain could catch up, he thought.  
Stacker gave him a pitying look and actually laughed. "What did you _think_ Herc was short for?"  
Raleigh shrugged. "I dunno. Something Australian?"

Stacker hefted another brick. "Name one other country where anyone would think it appropriate to name their son Hercules."  
"Yeah. You've got a point there. Even Americans aren't that...um. Well."

Stacker laughed again, and he looked a lot less forboding when he wasn't standing stock-still and looking like he stepped off the cover of GQ. 

"Audacious. The word you're looking for is audacious, and actually, you are, the lot of you. The sticking point as to why I wanted to move here, though, is because the prices of actual Spanish villas are obscene. And there are none whatsoever in Australia. It's all bungalows and row houses. No, thank you."  
Raleigh chuckled. "Never would've guessed."

"Oh, yes. Certainly not the sort of purchase one can afford on a retired airman's pension. Not without a hefty additional amount."  
Raleigh looked puzzled.

Stacker nodded, handing him another cinderblock rather than laying it himself.  
"I did say I was a test pilot. We--myself and my copilot, Tamsin, were...sort of commissioned to test a new jet. Supposedly it could break the sound barrier in record short distances, its power and speed unmatched." Stacker paused. Something off on the horizon must have suddenly become fascinating.  
Raleigh set the brick he'd been holding back down on the pallet.

Stacker glanced at him and continued, "Would you mind if I told you something? I think it might help you."

Raleigh clapped brick dust off his gloves and wondered if he was about to get life advice or a shovel talk--and for who? 

"Well, I wouldn't mind," he said, smiling, trying to look personable. "Sir."  
Stacker smiled, a little, but the expression didn't reach his eyes. He let his gaze wander, out over the horizon, to the brown uneven hills in the distance. 

When he began speaking, he was slow, methodic. He did not rush, did not spit the words out, though Raleigh was sure they were bitter on his tongue.

Stacker said, "On the day of our third run, there was a critical structural failure in one of the wings. We were moving too fast to regain proper control; another flaw we uncovered. A piece of metal the size of a saucer ripped a hole in the cockpit canopy, and we depressurized so fast our masks couldn't compensate. Tamsin lost consciousness. I wrestled that little beast back over the marker, only to have it practically disintegrate around us as I set it down. That was...Tamsin's last flight. That piece of metal embedded itself so deep in her shoulder the medics had to cut the seat foam out around it to get her out.  
We...Tamsin's family and myself...were compensated very handsomely, as you can imagine."  
"I'm sorry." Raleigh said, because there was nothing else TO say. "Tamsin must have been amazing. Brave as hell."

"She and my sister were the best pilots of our class," Stacker said, without a trace of false modesty. His voice held only a kind of pride--a fondness, a respect.  
Raleigh could only look at him.

The only thing he could think about was Stacker, alone up there, flying a jet with the wind ripping chunks off of it, with his best friend bleeding out in the seat in front of him, and him unable to do a damn thing except talk to her, talk to her.

His mind started to do its little evil reminder-lists--do you think he whispered her name, the way you did Yancy's? Do you think she talked back? Could she? Do you think she knew? Do you think he did?  
He had to shake himself. The thoughts sidled deeper into his mind, into murkier waters. He was glad to feel them recede. 

Stacker nodded, almost brusque. "I do hope I'm not overstepping any bounds. Mako showed me your notebook. Quite remarkable, really. I would never presume to say that I understand what you've been through--I dislike platitudes. But...I wanted to speak to you about it. Better late than never, I figured," He paused, and cast a sobering glance at Raleigh before he continued, "You're stronger than you think. If you've come this far, you are your own master and can do as you please."

He looked at Raleigh. "I'm telling you this, Raleigh, because I wish someone had told _me_."  
"Beg your pardon, sir?"

Stacker fixed him with a look, then, that was a mix of stern dad and austere commander. Raleigh straightened his back without thinking.

"I knew even before Mako showed me your book. During the dinner, I couldn't help but notice. You had the thousand-yard-stare--the eyes of a man who has seen hell. I knew you were still seeing it. I saw it, for years, after Tamsin was killed. But you are stronger than your demons."  
"Uh, Dad," Chuck called, and Stacker looked over at him.

"I had better go. Whenever Chuck uses that tone, it usually means something's gone terribly awry." he paused a moment. "Think about what I said, will you, Raleigh?"  
Raleigh nodded, and watched Stacker walk away.

He and Chuck had a very animated conversation--on Chuck's end, at least--with a lot of hand-waving and face-making and one instance where he and Chuck locked eyes and Chuck absolutely _froze_ then looked away hastily, only to look right back at Raleigh and freeze again.

Stacker was looking between the two of them with an unrearable look that made Raleigh tilt his head. A moment later the two of them went inside, and he shrugged, still wondering what they'd been talking about, and went back to his work.

Raleigh was left with the sensation that he'd just been standing too close to a heater. He wiped his face with the back of one arm and went back to work. The Weis kept giving him sympathetic glances--or, well, Cheung did, while Jin and Hu had started mumbling back and forth in Cantonese, and occasionally shooting a glance at him--but all he could do was shrug; he didn't even know what else to say. 

They worked in companionable quiet for a while, before the sound of someone else's boots over the gravel made them lift their heads again.  
"You're really popular this afternoon," Mako said, conversationally. She was carrying four bottles of water.

After tossing one to each of the Weis, she offered him a bottle, its sides glistening faintly with condensation; he smiled, but waved it off.  
"I think you impressed my father. I saw him talking to you."

"Yeah, but I think I freaked your brother out. Which is weird, 'cause I don't even know what I did."  
Mako wrinkled her nose and rolled her eyes. "Oh, don't worry about Chuck. Eventually he'll calm down."  
Aleksis called Raleigh to announce that they needed more bricks from the pallet, and he nodded and waved back.

She walked with him as he wheeled the wheelbarrow back to the pallet of cinderblocks.  
He had the wheelbarrow half-loaded when he misjudged how good of a grip he had on one of the bricks. He managed to narrowly avoid dropping it on his left foot, but the angle he'd caught it at made a sharp twinge shoot up his arm.

He dropped the cinderblock on top of the others in the wheelbarrow, hissing softly.  
"Raleigh! Are you all right?"  
"Nerve damage," he gasped. "It only hurts some of the time."  
One of the big Russians hurried over, looking worried.

"Is your arm?" he asked.  
"Yeah, man, but I'll be fine."

The Russian did not seem convinced. "Most of strength is knowing limits, Raleigh," he said.  
He did not add anything--just lifted the cinderblocks easily, and strode away.  
"Thank you, Aleksis!" Mako called after him.

The blonde woman glanced up from where she was in the middle of liberally slathering cement slurry along the tops of one of the rows of cinderblocks they'd already laid in place. She looked once at the big Russian man, who set the cinderblocks down on the pyramid of others, and her mouth quirked up at one corner.

Mako smiled back, feeling half-confused.  
"Actually, that was Sasha," Raleigh said, half-laughing, and Mako looked back at him and stared.  
"What? OH!"

"Yeah, it happens to them a lot. Aleksandra and Aleksander. Aleksis and Sasha." Raleigh chuckled. "Don't worry. Almost everyone makes that guess. Sometimes they tell people the wrong names just to mess with 'em. S'pretty funny, actually."

Mako looked between the Kaidonovskies--who were now working in tandem like a perfectly-synchronized machine, bricking up a section of wall with rapid precision--and Raleigh. She smiled.  
"You really do enjoy this work, don't you?" She asked.

He shrugged. "Yeah. Puts food on the table. I like working with plants better than I like working with bricks, but, eh."

"Mako, could you--" Tendo called, and Mako smiled at him a final time before walking away.  
Raleigh turned back to the bricks, but when he went to pick up another one, hot flares of pain spiked in his elbow, and ran up to his shoulder. His whole arm started to tingle and burn. 

He clenched his teeth, wriggling his fingers, trying to work off the ache.  
Yancy would worry if he came home and needed to use his sling again, he knew.  
The pain was settling, though--not worsening, but not fading, either.

He sighed and straightened, but didn't have time to say anything before he was bracketed by the pair of huge Russians, who herded him towards the paved area nearer the house.

Herc met them at the door, going from personable and friendly to personable and worried in 2.5 seconds when he saw Raleigh.  
"Did you smash your hand?" he asked.  
Raleigh shook his head. "S'my shoulder."

"Did you put it out?" Herc asked, his eyebrows shooting up his forehead.  
"No, it's--" And Raleigh actually had to shoo the Kaidonovskies away, they were pressed so anxiously close--and he wondered if Yancy had told them to keep an eye on him, to make sure he wouldn't overdo it.  
It wouldn't surprise him, he thought, with a mix of affection and mild annoyance.

They were back inside the kitchen, with Herc offering him ice for his arm--which he accepted more out of politeness than anything--and water.  
Raleigh tried to laugh. "Do you do this for all the handymen you hire?" 

Herc smirked, a little. "Only the ones Tendo brings over. Figured you must be like family, if he brought you along outside of work."

"Yeah, basically," Raleigh agreed, and stood awkwardly beside the kitchen island before Herc nodded at one of the barstools.  
"You can sit, if you'd rather," he said.

So Raleigh sat awkwardly and half-held his arm, watching as Herc filled a plastic bag full of ice.  
Raleigh started to go for his pocket, for the bottle of painkillers there, before wondering if they wouldn't slow him down worse. He'd toughed it out through harsher breakthrough pain.

Herc set the bag of ice in front of him, and started to say something when a door closed somewhere else in the house.

Footsteps, and then there was Chuck coming into the kitchen.  
"There you are, Herc," Chuck said. He came striding into the kitchen like he owned every square inch of it, black leash dangling from one of his hands.

The brown-and-white bulldog trotted after him, grinning and panting, white medical cone still wobbling on his neck. 

"You've got a phone call," he said, and all but shoved the phone into Herc's chest.  
"...Thanks. You weren't going to take Max for a walk with his stitches--?" Herc began.

Chuck shrugged and looked over at Raleigh, the conversation being apparently over. A moment later Herc was lifting the phone to his ear, greeting the person on the phone and asking who it was.

Apparently he wasn't too pleased to hear from whoever it was, because he ducked his head and lowered his voice, and left the room in a hurry, looking hunted.

Raleigh lifted the bag of ice onto his shoulder, deciding to wait before taking his meds.  
Chuck stood a moment in the kitchen with him, shifting on his feet, before Raleigh sighed and decided that if he wasn't even going to attempt to be civil, he'd be the bigger man and step up himself.

"Hi." He said.  
"...Hey," Chuck said, and shuffled his feet some more. 

Raleigh was starting to wonder if maybe he didn't just have a rock in his shoe or something.  
Chuck continued, in the flat tone, "What happened to your arm?"  
Raleigh looked down at his arm, then back at Chuck, surprised.

"It's just an old army injury," he said. Part of him was waiting for Chuck to try to goad him about it.  
Chuck did not. Instead, he walked to the fridge, glancing sidelong at Raleigh as he did.  
Max trotted over to Raleigh and looked up at him expectantly.

"Hey, buddy! Sorry I can't pet you. Only got one good arm right now. Maybe later?"  
Max wagged his tail--well, his butt, since his tail was a little stub--and sat down beside his stool.

When he looked back up, Chuck was holding a quart container of juice, looking at Raleigh.  
Before Raleigh could ask him why, he blurted out, "So, about the other day--I just. I wanted to give this back to you."

He set the juice on the counter and dug into his pants' back pocket, and came back up with Raleigh's little black sketchbook.  
So, he _had_ seen him with it. 

"Oh," Raleigh said, surprised and not sure what he should do. He held out his hand and Chuck handed him the notebook--very noticeably NOT shoving it at him or tossing it onto the countertop.  
"I borrowed it from Mako. I...read through it a few times. S'pretty good. Your stuff, I mean." He made a pained face. "I mean--your artwork."

He was rubbing the back of his neck, darting glances between the floor tiles and Raleigh's face.  
When he looked that way--nervous, penitent, a little shy--Raleigh's initial thought that he was cute resurfaced.

Physically, at least. The man seemed to be a huge bundle of personality problems, though.  
"Oh. Well, thanks, man." Raleigh said.

"Yeah. And...listen, about...before." He hesitated, looked Raleigh full in the face for a beat. Then he took a deep breath and continued, "It was really shitty of me, to say that stuff about you and your brother. I didn't know. I mean--even if I _had_ known, I still shouldn't've...I was being an ass. Sorry."  
And then Raleigh nodded, suddenly understanding. "Okay. All right." 

Chuck looked so sincerely penitent that the built-up annoyance Raleigh felt towards him softened. He picked up his sketchbook, ruffled its pages lightly.

"You've got one in there where it's a bunch of drawings of dogs. It's really quite good," Chuck said.  
Raleigh smiled a little. "Thanks..." 

He fumbled one-handed with the sketchbook, trying to stuff it into one of his own pockets and failing.  
Every time he even attempted to straighten his arm, a bolt of pain went straight to the bone. If he so much as moved his shoulder, the joint screamed and burned in protest.

It must have been one hell of a show, because Chuck shifted against the countertop and murmured, "D'you, uh. Want something for that?"

When Raleigh looked up at Chuck, his brow was furrowed but his face was unreadable. He was half-leaning away from the counter, towards Raleigh. He was pointing at Raleigh's bent arm.  
Raleigh shook his head, grimacing. "I've got my own meds," he said. 

Which he finally had to admit that he needed. At least they weren't in one of the pants' cargo pockets, so there was no struggle to get those--just in his pocket and back out, without moving his injured arm from where it rested on the countertop.

A moment later he was popping the white cap off the little orange pill bottle with practiced ease that he was trying not to think about.  
He glanced back up and saw Chuck--still watching him--with a look he'd never expected to see on the other man's face.

Chuck Hansen, who seemed unable to string two words together without making them into an insult, was looking at Raleigh with sympathy and _concern_.

Raleigh didn't know how to feel about that.

"You aren't going to swallow that dry, are you?" Chuck asked.  
Raleigh looked down at the little tablet in his palm. He looked back up at Chuck.  
"Uh. Well, yeah..."

Chuck made a noise, then, and the honest concern slid underneath something more familiar--something Raleigh was starting to recognize was more show-bravado than anything else. 

"Here, I'll pour you something to drink. No sense in choking down a pill and ending up with a sore throat on top of..." he glanced at Raleigh's arm for a moment too long, grimaced in embarrassment, and then poured him the juice.  
"You didn't have togive me so much," Raleigh said.

Chuck set the glass in front of him, shrugging. "It's only got three days left before it goes bad, anyway."

A moment later he must have realized how that sounded, because he grimaced again and blurted, "I mean--I'm the only one who drinks it! So you can have as much as you want. I bought it myself."

Raleigh took the pill with a huge gulp of the juice, sighing as he set the cup down.  
"Thanks," Raleigh said.  
Their eyes met again and the silence was so thick he could actually hear Max's wet breathing from down below the counter.

Raleigh was about to ask him if Mako had told him what he's said, but then Herc came back into the kitchen. He was still holding the phone, and unhappiness was written in every line of his body.

"What'd Gran say?" Chuck asked him, the hard edge coming back to his voice.  
"Your granddad's ill."  
Chuck scoffed. "What, did he have another heart attack after finally realizing that Uncle Scott is a sack of shit?"

Raleigh's eyebrows jumped up his forehead. He half-expected Herc to corner Chuck and chew him out--but Herc only pursed his lips into a thin line, and shook his head.

"Chuck," Herc muttered, drawing close to him. "Not...not now."  
Chuck smirked--the expression openly scornful, and shrugged.

Herc rifled through a few drawers, all of them full of miscellaneous items, until he came up with a small black contact book. He pulled it out and flipped through it, before walking out of the kitchen as quickly as he'd walked in.

"Why do you do that?" Raleigh asked.  
Chuck looked back at him, the thunderclouds on his brow exaporating the moment he laid eyes on Raleigh.  
"What?"

"That. That...thing you do," Raleigh made a little face and gestured, "where you attack people like that."  
To his continuing surprise, Chuck looked like he caught him off-guard. He didn't say anything, just started to shake his head.

"You go from being an okay guy to...just..." Raleigh shook his head. "Why were you such a jerk towards Herc, just now?" Raleigh asked.  
The ice pack shifted on his shoulder and he had to compensate by shifting slightly.  
Chuck snorted. "Long story. I'd rather not share."

All the good thoughts Raleigh was starting to have about him evaporated like steam.  
"Okay. Then, in that case, why do you keep acting like such a jerk towards _me_?"  
And then Chuck looked honestly floored.  
"What--" the Australian began.

Raleigh continued, "The following me, the staring. Everything! Did I _say_ something I should be aware of? Is this your way of giving me permanent stinkeye so I'll stay away from your sister, or something? That it? Is this some kind of protective big brother thing?"

Chuck scoffed. "Mako can fight her own battles. If she didn't like you, she'd have broken your face and I wouldn't've had to do a damn thing."  
"Then why? What did I do to you?"

Chuck looked light he was fighting an internal war with himself. Twice, he started to say something, before finally he spit out, "It's not...you don't understand."

"What is there to understand? Tendo told me what happened. I'm sorry things didn't work out. I even asked Mako to explain how things are, 'cause I was pretty sure you didn't want to hear it from me. But that doesn't seem to matter--it's like you just pick a random person in the room to dump all over them, and then when you're done, you move on to your next target. I don't _get_ you, man."  
Chuck's face clouded over again, and he was about to storm out of the kitchen.

He reached the entryway before he stopped. His shoulders rose and fell, once, and he spun around on his heel.

"Feels like all I do is apologize to you," Chuck said. "But listen. You're...Tendo's a good...friend of the family, and even if he's not...into me like that, he's _still_ my friend. And you're his friend. So what I said was wrong. I'd just rather not discuss painful family history with friends-of-friends. Okay?"

He spoke quickly, but never broke eye contact. And when he'd finished, he took a half-step back, apparently decided against it, and stood completely still.  
Raleigh cleared his throat.

Chuck crossed his arms over his chest, and made the exact face Herc had made moments before--lips pursed, eyebrows drawn low--but he said nothing.  
"Okay." Raleigh said.

And then Chuck seemed to deflate a little.  
He nodded once--a small, clipped nod--and then he was turning and walking out of the kitchen, leaving Raleigh alone.

For a moment, at least. Tendo came inside, moments later, shucking off his gloves and stomping sand off his boots on the doormat.  
"Was that as bad as it looked?" he asked.

Raleigh started to shrug--then winced, when the ache shot from his shoulder into his collarbone--and shook his head instead.

"I don't get him. He was...for a minute, he seemed like he was calming down." Raleigh stared at the countertop, at the half-full glass of juice.

He poked it, gently, and mumbled, "He gave me some juice. And then, right before you came in here, he just...I dunno, he snapped again and said some pretty messed-up stuff to Herc. I dunno why. I feel like I'm not getting the complete story."

Tendo sighed. "With the Hansens? You're not. But I was asking about your arm."  
Raleigh gave him a blank look. 

The ice pack slid off his arm and plopped onto the countertop, and he repositioned it, trying not to look hurt.  
He failed. This came with the territory of Tendo having known him for half a decade, though, so he figured he might have expected the frustrated noise Tendo made.

"What? Seriously, Tendo, it's been worse. I'll be okay."  
They were silent a moment.  
"You think it's gonna improve?" Tendo asked. He looked very pointedly at Raleigh's arm.  
Raleigh followed his glance, and sighed again.

"I dunno. I have to wait 'til the meds kick in. I should be fine to work again in half an hour, so--"  
But Tendo held up both hands. "Look, Becket, I know you wanna pull your weight and all that, but you gotta give yourself a break. Rest your arm before it falls off!"

Raleigh smiled sadly. "I don't remember the doctors saying there was any danger of that happening..."  
"Yeah, well, it's just as well if you injure it so bad you can't use it. Just sit tight. We'll wrap up in an hour or so, okay?"

So Raleigh stayed parked on a stool in the kitchen, alone. He could hear someone walking back and forth in a straight line upstairs--he guessed someone was pacing a hallway--as well as muffled voices through the ceiling and walls.

He watched Mako walking back and forth, talking with the rest of the others. Something the Hu said made her laugh so hard she doubled over. The Kaidonovskys were sharing a cigarette and still working in tandem--Sasha set bricks, Aleksis slapped cement slurry down--occasionally pausing to speak to one another. He watched their mouths move silently, feeling useless and helpless and a little annoyed.

He looked back down at his sketchpad, and thought about Chuck reading it.  
Why would he have? he wondered. It was obvious that Chuck didn't even _like_ Raleigh, so why look through his sketchbook? 

Chuck's remark about the page with the dogs' faces came back to his mind. He flipped to it with his good hand, awkwardly holding the book flat against the counter one-handed. His grip slipped, though, and he ended up on the last drawn page--the picture of the trees.

He thought about the trees--now stripped of half their limbs, they were barren as sticks. He sighed and flipped the sketchbook closed.

The sun was slanting through the windows at a sharp angle before Tendo called it.  
Raleigh's arm continued to hurt, the same dull ache running all the way into the bone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took so long. If you are still here, thank you for your patience, and I hope you enjoy reading.
> 
> If you just read this, thanks for stopping by, and I hope you stick around for later chapters! :)


	10. Like Bookends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few explanations. People continue to be very concerned about Raleigh. Raleigh remains determined not to mope. Chuck passes out party invitations!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank everyone who has been reading this--especially everyone who waited and waited for this update. I am very sorry it took me so long to get this next chapter up. I've been going through a rough patch, and I am so, so grateful for your patience. 
> 
> If you just started and blasted your way through the entire fic already, thank you so much, too! I hope you've enjoyed the ride so far. :)

The purple evening sky was full of wispy, fluffy-edged clouds, and there was the faintest breeze up. Outside, the trees swayed slightly, and the rosemary hedge growing beneath the kitchen window was scratching faintly, pleasantly, against the bottom of the panes of glass.

Inside, Yancy watched the darkening sky for a moment before looking back down at the task at hand.  
"I just...don't know what to do," Yancy said, at last.  
"So talk at me 'til you get some ideas," Tendo said.

Yancy sighed and set the last plate in the drying rack, and turned around slightly.  
The house was quiet. In the living room, he had a movie on--he didn't remember what--for background noise.   
There was no sound at all from Raleigh's room.

Everyone except Tendo had come and gone. They'd even managed to coax Raleigh out of his room for a bit--long enough for Tendo to get a cup of coffee and a sandwich into him, at least--but he'd excused himself and practically fled, almost hunched over his arm in its sling.

"I just...don't think it's good for him anymore. You know? I wish there was some way we could stretch a little, maybe hire somebody else...give him some time to rest, or something."

Tendo made a thoughtful noise. He was leaning against the counter beside Yancy, his arms folded across his chest.

"But then what would he do? Come on, Yancy, you know he's got too much energy to just put him on the bench like that. It'd drive him up the walls." Tendo paused, and gave him a sobering look. "Then he'd drive _you_ up the walls."

"Better that than him slinking around like a hurt cat, hiding all the damn time," Yancy said.

"Huh. Well, all I know is, if you're going to try to get him to stop with Pacifica, you'd better have a damn compelling replacement."  
Yancy didn't know what to say to that. 

Tendo was watching him with bright, curious dark eyes.   
"What?" Yancy said.   
"That's not all you're worried about, is it?" Tendo asked.

Yancy glanced at him, finished wringing his hands dry, and tossed the towel over the sink faucet. He shook his head, moved slowly to the kitchen table, and sat down slowly in one of the chairs.

Tendo followed him, settling into the chair opposite--sitting backwards, his folded arms on the backrest, his chin on his arms. 

Tendo was one of the few people he knew who could read others effortlessly, who could always tell if someone was bullshitting or holding back.  
It was one of the things Yancy liked about him.

After a solid minute in silence, Yancy braced his elbows on the table and dropped his head into his hands.

"Okay, all right! I'm worried about Ray, Tendo. Real worried. Do you think--do you think his arm's, I dunno, getting worse or something?"  
Tendo sighed softly. "Only he knows that. Did he say something?"

Yancy sighed. "No, but you know him. How likely is he to? Kid'll probably keep trying to play through the pain 'til his fingers turn blue and fall off."

Tendo smirked, faintly. "I said something similar, at the P-and-H place. He swore up and down that'd never happen." 

"And you believed him?" Yancy said. He ran a hand through his hair, exhaling hard. "He's, like, the walking definition of 'boundless optimism'. He doesn't know when to stop." He looked away from Tendo, feeling so, so tired.

"So give him a day off. Or two. Something. Tell him he's earned it; god knows it's true." Tendo said. 

~

Sling days were awful.   
They meant that Pacifica was down a person, which in turn meant that they'd had to ask the Weis to split so that Cheung and Tendo could make a team, while Jin and Hu were another, and Alexis and Sasha were the third. More work all around, Raleigh figured, and hated it.

He was lying on his back in bed, his injured arm cradled on his stomach, supported in his old medical sling whose Velcro straps had seen better days. 

He'd thought he would have been all right the next morning; he'd gone home, taken a hot shower, and slipped on the sling. The pain had ebbed a little, and wasn't actively spiking up and down his arm anymore, so, he'd thought he'd be okay the next morning.  
He'd thought wrong.

All night he'd tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable at all.  
Lying on his back had made his shoulder stiffen up painfully; rolling onto his side made his elbow and bicep hurt so badly that sleep wasn't even an option. Lying on his stomach with it stretched out gave him a massive neck-ache.

After taking another dose of painkillers, he ended up sitting up in bed, propped against the bed's headboard by all three of his pillows. 

He'd drifted in and out of an uneasy sleep, like that--half-lying, half-sitting, his blanket tucked into his armpits to stop it from sliding off him while he slept.   
And when it was finally morning, he couldn't believe it, but he actually remembered, for the first time in years, how it felt to _not_ be happy to wake up.

He thought a lot about what had happened in the previous days. About the Pentecost-Hansens and their seemingly perfect lives--and his realization of how fragile it all was; about the look Herc had had on his face, and Chuck's snide comment. 

He didn't understand him at all--someone whose life ought to be paradise--two loving dads, terrific sister, ugly-cute dog, nice--okay, _really_ nice--house...and Chuck was still apparently so unsatisfied, so unhappy, so _angry_. He almost thought about Chuck being ungrateful, but he remembered what Tendo had said about not getting the whole story about the Hansens.

Which really just made him wonder exactly what had happened to make Chuck so aggressive all the time.

He sighed. It wasn't like he'd ever get a chance to find out. The wall was mostly done; once they finished, he'd have no reason to go back over there. He snorted softly to himself when he realized he'd miss the house and talking to Mako more than anything. This new thing, he thought, the new curiosity about the Hansen part of the family, was probably no good. Herc and Stacker were nice to him, though, but he was used to keeping to the small circle of friends he had, not trying to branch out.

Anyway, he told himself, he sure as shit didn't need any obnoxious half-friends who he wasn't even sure he could talk to without getting into an argument, or possibly a fistfight.  
Gingerly, he rubbed the fingers of his left hand with his right; his left-hand fingers were slightly cold, and stiff from not moving them. He wrapped his right-hand fingers around them and sighed.   
Lying in bed was getting kind of old.

He sighed again, then sat up.  
If he was going to have a day off, he told himself, he might as well try to enjoy it.

~

In another part of the city, Chuck opened his eyes, stretched, scratched himself like a yeti, and then rolled out of bed. He was determined to stop being so pathetic.   
He'd find _something_ to do--maybe actually start applying for jobs like he'd originally decided to. 

That was the expectation. The reality was that he ended up sitting on his bed, eating cereal and milk and playing video games until noon.  
Someone knocked on his door--which was open, which meant it was a polite formality only, which meant the person knocking was--  
"Oh. Hey, Dad."

"Good morning, Chuck." Stacker looked over the mess of comics spread all over his bed, at Max's doggie bed, which was covered with shreds of grody grayish rawhide that Max had gnawed off the biggest piece--and finally at Chuck.  
He sighed, but his eyes had that dad-smile that told him he was more amused than annoyed.

"Your father and I were thinking," Stacker said, in the tones that told him that what he was about to say was Very Important.

Chuck paused the game and set his controller beside his knee, and actually sat up.  
"Yeah?" he said. "'Bout what?"

"Well, we'll have a proper yard once the wall is done. Should be rather nice. We were thinking of having a party to celebrate finishing the wall. You know. A barbecue, most likely, because your father is dying to char a few dozen pieces of meat, and I know how you love barbecue almost as much as you love letting Max eat half of whatever you put on your plate. Mako thinks it would be interesting, as well." He paused and inclined his head towards Chuck slightly.

Chuck made an incredulous snort of laughter. "Dad, are you...inviting me to a party in our backyard?"

Stacker laughed. "Actually, I was going to tell you that we'll be inviting quite a few people--including all the crews from Pacifica Landscaping. I thought I'd suggest you play nice."

And Chuck laughed again, this time hoping he didn't sound too forced.  
"And Doc Gottlieb and Newt?"  
"Of course."

He breathed a sigh of relief. At least if the two of them were there, he thought, he would be so busy talking to them that he wouldn't be able to embarrass himself in front of Raleigh or Tendo.

So he got dressed, very seriously _not_ letting his mind stray anywhere near thoughts about Tendo (or Raleigh) while he was in the shower. Stacker had made sandwiches for lunch, and Chuck sidled up beside Stacker to take one, and didn’t even pretend to protest when Stacker gave him a one-armed hug. 

“Would you mind terribly,” Stacker asked, “Going to the store to pick up a few things?”  
The way he said this very heavily implied that he thought Chuck should go out just to get some fresh air. He had too much tact to _say_ that, though; somehow Stacker understood him in ways that even Herc didn’t. 

He shrugged a little. “Yeah, sure. Write me a list?”

Fifteen minutes later, when he was jogging back downstairs with his shoes in one hand and a jacket in the other, Mako caught him on the stairs.  
Her hair was pulled back behind a sweatband and he could hear music spilling out of her room--something symphonic that sounded vaguely electronic. 

“Are you going out?”  
“Yeah. Dad’s sending me to the grocery store,” he said.  
“So, you’ll be going past the library?”  
“Yeah,” he said, shrugging a little. “Why? You need a few things?”  
She smiled, then. “I’ll get you my list.” 

~

The wind was sighing through the eucalyptus trees outside, long blade-shaped leaves tumbling down to land on the grass. An old woman and her service dog were out front, the dog off its lead, its vest folded beside her on the stone bench. She was laughing as the dog chased leaves.

Raleigh put down the hard graphite pencil and reached for a softer one, careful not to jostle his left arm.

He was sitting in the western wing of the city's old library, in a chair that probably hadn't been reupholstered since the early 1970s. The table was even older, he guessed, as were the rows and rows of gray metal shelves, crammed to bursting with books.

But he loved the smell of the place, all the books; most of all, though, he loved all the old books about photography, and the anatomical guidebooks from the sixties with the diagrams all drawn in scratchy, angular pen. 

He sighed again, looking back from his surroundings and back down at his sketchbook--one of his big ones, since holding a smaller one open while he drew was a two-handed job, and right then he was a one-handed man.  
His mouth twisted at the thought.

Days off were a rare treat--there was always something that needed fixing, calls that needed to be made, more supplies that needed to be ordered or put away. Normally he would relish the chance to just sit and read and draw. Now, though, on what was essentially a forced vacation, he kept...drifting off. He couldn't get himself to focus on the drawing he'd been scratching at for the last hour; he couldn't read more than a few paragraphs out of any of the bunch of books he'd grabbed.

He kept wondering what Yancy and Tendo and the rest of Pacifica's members were doing without him.   
Just as his eyes were drifting up from the sketchpad--again--he heard a noise from the stacks to his right.

It sounded like someone trying to carry a very large stack of books, and mostly failing.  
He straightened in his chair, worrying it was one of the sweet old librarians. All of them looked so frail he was scared they'd blow away.   
Instead, he saw Chuck Hansen.

Chuck Hansen, juggling a stack of textbooks and an inch-thick stack of papers, held together with a binder clip.

Chuck Hansen, in a white-and-gray striped t-shirt, over jeans with ratty knees, juggling a stack of textbooks and a stack of papers.

Raleigh saw him pause in the middle of the aisle, looking around. Apparently he didn't see whatever he was looking for, because he swore softly and began walking again, disappearing into the stacks.  
Raleigh looked away, back at his sketchpad. 

He could hear the soft rasp of someone walking in a pair of jeans, punctuated by soft under-the-breath swears, and the papery sound of someone _almost_ dropping an armload of books.

When he looked back up, Chuck was standing at the end of another row, with more books in his stack. He half-turned, and the stack--six books, all very thick--sliding off in different directions, flapping down onto the floor loudly.

Chuck sighed and made a Why Me gesture up at the ceiling, before kneeling to gather the dropped books.

Raleigh sighed softly. Pity finally won out, though, and he stood up and walked to where Chuck was crouched. The other man was still swearing under his breath.  
Raleigh knelt and picked up a book that had skittered away from him.  
Chuck took it without looking at his face, muttering, "Thanks."  
"...You're welcome."

And then Chuck looked back up at him, almost like he noticed he was there for the first time. Raleigh almost wanted to laugh at his expression--he looked so completely freaked out--but instead he only offered a small smile.

"Hi?" he tried.  
"Oh, shit! Hi! Thanks." Chuck paused, looked down at the books, then back up at Raleigh.   
"Sorry."  
"For what?"

And then Chuck hesitated. A long, slow moment, and finally he looked back at the books and licked his bottom lip. "Honestly, I just feel like I ought to be saying that to you. Just...kinda slipped out."  
And then Raleigh _did_ laugh.  
"Well, um. Apology accepted. You looked like you were having a pretty big struggle back there..."

Chuck looked freaked out again--this time only for a second before he smoothed it away--and he looked away again, putting another book back on top of the stack.   
"S'what I get for trying to be a good brother."  
Raleigh's eyebrows climbed his forehead. "These are for Mako?"  
Chuck shrugged. "Yeah."

Raleigh took a quick glance at the cover of one. "Advanced Theories of Robotic Engineering? Whoa."  
Chuck smiled and sort of...snorted through his nose, softly. A laugh? 

"Yeah. Mako's something else. We, ah, used to get into a lot of trouble as kids, 'cause I'd break things, and she'd try to put 'em back together again. She's, ah, been into machines for a pretty long time." Chuck paused, then snorted again.  
"Really? Wow," Raleigh said. "Pretty cool."

"Yeah, not when your dads are angry and demanding to know what happened to the radio, and neither of you wants to admit anything."

Chuck did the sigh-snort-thing again--and when he was smiling, when he wasn't scowling or saying horrible rude things, the thought resurfaced that Chuck was actually cute.  
Raleigh bit his lip and slid a final book on top of the formidable stack.  
"Thanks for helping me with these," Chuck said.

He went to pick up the tottering stack and two slid off the top almost immediately.  
"You know what--why don't you let me carry these?"  
And then Chuck looked at his arm--looked freaked out again--and started to turn him down.  
"Are you sure? Your arm--"

"As long as I don't move it, I'm fine. Besides, with a stack like that, you really need to get to a table anyway." He tilted his head back, in the direction of the table he'd been sitting at. "I have a table, if you want to just drop your stuff off there while you finish looking."  
Chuck looked freaked out-- _again_ \--and Raleigh was starting to wonder if maybe he didn't have some kind of freakish bug crawling in and out of his hair, or something--but the other man only asked, "How did you--"

"Today's my off day; I'm sitting at the table over there. I saw you walking up and down the aisles," Raleigh explained. "So, you’re on a textbook run?"

Chuck sighed and smirked a little. "Yeah, actually. Stock here's pretty good when it comes to that. She likes older versions of some books--'to see the devices in their primitive forms', or something."  
Raleigh nodded. "Sounds neat."

Chuck shrugged. Together, they walked back to the table, where they dumped their armloads of books. 

Chuck hesitated a long moment, his eyes falling on Raleigh's scattered drawing stuff--his sketchpad, the pencils, the stack of books.  
"You're drawing," he said. 

And then he must have realized how he sounded, because he grimaced. "I mean--that's an interesting. Er. Sketch."  
This time, Raleigh couldn't help it. He laughed, a little, and Chuck made an unreadable face at him.  
"Thanks..."

Chuck smiled at him, hesitant, before he looked down at the sketchpad and walked around the table to get a better view, his mouth falling slightly open.  
"That's a _really_ interesting..." he paused, then looked up, out past the trees.   
"That's--!"  
"Yeah," Raleigh said.  
"Holy shit!" 

"Ah, it's not that good," Raleigh said. Or, at least, he didn't think so.  
Chuck must have thought it was false modesty, because he looked back up at him and smirked, shaking his head. "Well, it's no Rembrandt, but if you keep going at this rate, you'll get there soon enough," he said.  
Raleigh looked at him incredulously for a moment, before laughing.  
"Thank you?"  
"Yeah, well." Chuck looked between the trees and the sketchpad again, then asked, "Do you do this a lot?"  
"What, landscapes? Yeah. I like 'em," Raleigh said. He was waiting for the almost-inevitable question it seemed like people always asked artists--which was, Will You Draw Me?

Chuck surprised him, though. He looked back up at Raleigh and smiled--a real smile, not a scornful pinched one.   
"You had a lot more drawings of buildings, in your other book," Chuck said. "S'neat to see some of your other stuff."  
Raleigh felt a bloom of warm pride spread through his chest, at that.  
"Thanks..." 

Chuck shrugged a little, "Yeah, well. I'd, ah. I've gotta get the rest of these books. I'll be back," he added, hastily--an embarrassed look crossing his face--before he turned and hurried away. 

Raleigh sat back down, bemused, and went back to drawing. He was debating whether to color the trees or just do the shadows and leave them as a sketch when Chuck returned with two more books. He added them to the stack, glanced for a second too long at the chair opposite Raleigh.

"...You know, you can sit down if you wanna," Raleigh said, not-really-managing to keep the laughter out of his voice.

Chuck made a face--part annoyance and part something else--and he mumbled, " _I_ know that," he said. Then, he gave Raleigh another unreadable look, and continued, blithely, "I'm just not sure how to operate this old model of chair. I hear they're quite challenging. I'm surprised a Yank like you is managing, honestly."  
Raleigh laughed--hard--his eyebrows rising. 

"Well, the American school system is really behind," Raleigh said. "They train us on all kinds of old equipment. Old chairs; older computers..."  
"Must've been rough," Chuck said, and sat down.

"Yeah. It always sucked, when someone's floppy disk would get stuck in the drive..."  
And Chuck was giving him a look of horror so complete that Raleigh laughed again.   
"Hey, calm down, I'm just joking."  
 _"...How old are you?"_ Chuck asked, still shocked.  
"I believe the line is, 'A gentleman never tells'," Raleigh said, sagaciously, and Chuck snickered.

Raleigh didn't want to tell him that he wasn't even thirty, and that the incident with the floppy disk really _had_ happened--the perks of being a poor kid and going to an old, shitty, run-down school. Chuck, he realized, had probably been in a bunch of posh, nice schools--boarding schools, maybe even. Of course he'd looked shocked when Raleigh mentioned technology that old.

"Did you _really_ have computers that old?" Chuck said, after a moment.  
Raleigh fiddled with the pencil, and shrugged his good shoulder. "Yeah, actually. Did you guys have, like, all-new everything at your school?"

Chuck shook his head, then shrugged one shoulder. "Not all the schools, anyway. I don't know. Some were nicer than others."  
Raleigh tilted his head a little. "Some of the schools?"  
Chuck gave him an equally-quizzical look.

The information clicked in place. "Oh! Herc was in the military when you were a kid, wasn't he?"  
Chuck's lip twisted a little--Raleigh felt a quick pang of worry that he'd said the wrong thing--but the other man only said, "Yeah. Moved around a lot." 

"Oh. I'm guessing you didn't like it too much?"  
Chuck shook his head. "It was pretty awful."  
"I'm sorry," Raleigh said, and meant it. 

He remembered stories about army kids having problems making friends, or just deciding not to make them at all. It was sad, but made sense--why get close to someone, when you'd be forced to leave them behind a few months later? 

The realization clicked into place like a light coming on. Another detail of the Hansens' story, something else that made him feel a bittersweet pang of not-quite-sadness.  
He must have been staring at Chuck and making a hell of a face, because Chuck looked back up from his sketchpad and back at his face and just sort of froze, his eyes widening slowly.  
"What?" he asked. It came out as a dry whisper.

Raleigh looked away quickly, embarrassed, shaking his head. "Oh, sorry. It's nothing, I was thinking--"  
"What about? Whether or not you should ask to draw me like one of your French girls?" Chuck said.  
And Raleigh laughed again, Chuck joining him after a moment, groaning, "Oh, my god..."

He twitched and sat up a moment later, then wriggled in his chair as he fished his phone out of his pocket. He frowned thoughtfully before answering the call.  
"Yeah, I'm still at the library. No, I'm not! Calm down, I'm coming home right now. --Barbecue sauce? If I buy some, Herc will chew my ass about it. He's making some from scratch." Chuck paused, glanced at Raleigh, and smiled hesitantly. A moment later he laughed, "Yeah, you're right. I'll grab some. No, no, no, _I'll_ do it, just stay there.” He paused a moment, listening, and then laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure. Bye." 

He gave Raleigh an apologetic look, and held the phone up. "Sorry. It was kind of important." He hesitated a moment, then spoke, "We're having a party to celebrate finishing the wall. --You guys finishing it, I mean. It's gonna be us and a few more of our friends. I, ah. Was wondering if maybe you'd like to come? My dad ‘n' Herc will probably invite everyone else from Pacifica Construction today.”

And the earnest expression was back, the not-quite-searching look on his face.  
Raleigh only hesitated a little bit. "Actually? Yeah. That sounds like it’ll be fun."  
“...Yeah. So. Uh.” Chuck mumbled. “Then...I’ll...see you there.”

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because I love the pairing of Stacker and Herc like burning and this idea wouldn't leave me alone.
> 
> Also, I don't have a beta-reader, so if there are any mistakes, they are all mine, and I apologize.
> 
> Finally, I hope you enjoyed reading it!


End file.
